Saudi Arabia Is Cutting Deliveries To The US -- September 2, 2020

Saudi Arabia cutting deliveries to US, following another huge misstep by Saudi Arabia. Bloomberg link here . Initial headline for this Bloomberg article: Saudi Arabia crude oil deliveries to US have all but halted. 

Cutting deliveries to US: Saudi Arabia. Recurrent story, posted several times. Another link here, Bloomberg. Follows yet another huge Saudi Arabian misstep. From the linked article:

Saudi Arabia is continuing to divert its oil away from America’s shores.

The kingdom last month loaded about 5.6 million barrels a day on to tankers, a small increase from July, vessel-tracking information compiled by Bloomberg show. Within that, an ever-smaller share went to the U.S., and cargo data show that deliveries in the week ended Aug. 28 dropped to what could be the lowest in decades.

For Saudi Arabia, cutting oil shipments into the U.S. is the quickest way to telegraph to the wider market that it’s tightening supply. The U.S. government is alone among major oil-consuming nations in publishing weekly data on crude stocks and imports, which carries enormous influence among oil traders. Those figures will be released later on Wednesday.

Saudi crude exports to the U.S. dwindled to about 177,000 barrels a day in August, tracking data show. Although that number could rise as more vessels indicate their final destination, it’s still a fraction of the 1.3 million barrels a day the kingdom shipped to America in April, when the flow threatened to upend the U.S. oil market.

While it’s clear that shipments on the trade route are slumping, data from vessel tracking and cargo unloadings often won’t tally perfectly with weekly import numbers produced by the Energy Information Administration. That’s because it’s not possible to know precisely when a cargo that gets unloaded will appear in the U.S. government data.

The U.S. imported 355,000 barrels of Saudi crude, or about 51,000 barrels a day, in the week through Aug. 28, customs data compiled by Bloomberg show. That entire volume arrived on the West Coast. The U.S. began publishing weekly data in 2010. Before then the figures were monthly. Flows in the weekly data have never been below 51,000 barrels a day. In September 1985, there were no receipts of Saudi crude for the entire month.

Government data processing and weather can further complicate the picture. A 496,000-barrel shipment of Saudi crude arrived in Port Arthur, Texas, on Aug. 21, though it wasn’t processed by customs until three days later, so it’s not clear whether it will be included in the EIA figures, which cover the period Aug. 22-28.