Yet another reason for high oil prices continuing...
No oil price relief in sight: analysts
[ CALGARY -- A school of thought is emerging in the oil world that regardless of what pledges might be made in Vienna this weekend, no new OPEC production is coming to market any time soon.
There simply aren't enough extra tankers available to get significantly more oil from the Persian Gulf -- where Saudi Arabia and others could pump more oil -- to consumers in the United States, Europe and Japan, analysts said yesterday.
"The tanker market is fairly close to capacity," said Julian Lee, an analyst at the Centre for Global Energy Studies in London. "There doesn't appear to be a lot of spare tankers around to move the stuff to market."
There are about 3,100 oil tankers in the world. Tanker freight rates, one indicator of a tight market, climbed three-fold this year before falling off in the past week.
For example, tanker moving 500,000 barrels of crude from OPEC-member Venezuela to the U.S. Gulf Coast would have cost $330,000 in late 1999, but the cost shot up past $880,000 in August.
The transportation-bottleneck theory is disputed by some ship owners and agents. ]
Rest of article at...
ottawacitizen.com
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