Global Oil Storage Capacity Filling up Fast

by Ship & Bunker News Team
Wednesday April 22, 2020

With much of conventional, land-based storage capacity accounted for, oil producers are looking at some unlikely options, according to Reuters.

About 130 million barrels of crude is already in floating storage, which is a more expensive method of oil storage compared to onshore storage.

But such is the surplus of unwanted oil that the northeastern United States has seen railway carriages and pipelines used to store product, the report said.

"We are now working on the most oddball storage locations, really tough locations where there are operational constraints," Krien van Beek, a broker at ODIN-RVB Tank Storage Solutions in Rotterdam, was quoted as saying.

Ernie Barsamian, chief executive of The Tank Tiger, a US terminal storage clearinghouse, was quoted as saying that "the big tanks where you pull a ship in and empty the whole thing, that's all gone. What you have is pots and pans."

The rise in storage demand is a direct function of the temporary collapse in oil demand from government action to hinder the spread of the coronavirus.