Twenty US Tankers Headed To Asia -- December 2, 2020

Breaking: Equinor shuts Europe's largest methanol plant after fire. Link here. 

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Original Post

First things first: from Bloomberg via Rigzone:

A fleet of around 20 tankers laden with U.S. crude oil is expected to leave for Asia this month as the region continues to outpace the rest of the world in its recovery from the Covid-19 pandemic.

The vessels have been booked, some of them provisionally, to load crude from the U.S. Gulf Coast this month for delivery to the Far East, according to shipping fixtures and shipbrokers. Most are supertankers that can each carry about 2 million barrels of oil.

Demand has rebounded in some parts of Asia, with Chinese crude processing matching a record in October. The nation’s independent refiners, meanwhile, have ramped up purchases after receiving new import quotas for 2021. Indian demand is also climbing as processors boost run rates.

Refinery news: Shell begins permanent shutdown of Convent, LA, refinery.

• 211,146 bpd refinery
• Shell had been unable to sell this refinery; so for now, simply shutting it down;
• 350 hourly workers at Convent
  

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Back to the Bakken

Active rigs:

$45.16	12/2/2020	12/02/2019	12/02/2018	12/02/2017	12/02/2016
Active Rigs	14	56	66	53	39

No wells coming off the confidential list.

RBN Energy: PADD 2 refineries continue a years-long shift to Canadian crude.

Fifteen years ago, just before the dawn of the Shale Era, more than 1.8 MMb/d of Gulf Coast and imported crude oil was being piped and barged north from PADD 3 to refineries in the Midwest. By 2019, those northbound flows had fallen by half, to less than 930 Mb/d, and in the first nine months of  this year they averaged only 550 Mb/d. Refineries in PADD 2, many now equipped with cokers and other hardware that enables them to break down heavy, sour crude into valuable refined products, have replaced those barrels — and more — with piped- and railed-in imports of favorably priced crude from Western Canada, including a lot of dilbit and railbit from Alberta’s oil sands. Today, we discuss the evolution of feedstock supply to the Midwest refinery sector.

This is the third episode in our series on the changing face of U.S. crude oil imports in each of the five PADDs. Earlier, we said that the Shale Revolution, combined with the development of the oil sands and other hydrocarbon resources in Western Canada, led to a dramatic decline in U.S. oil receipts from OPEC countries in particular and, to a lesser extent, from non-OPEC countries (other than Canada), and a big increase in imports from Canada. In 2005, the U.S. imported an average of 4.8 MMb/d from OPEC, 1.6 MMb/d from Canada, and 3.7 MMb/d from other non-OPEC countries, including 1.6 MMb/d from Mexico, according to the Energy Information Administration (EIA). By last year, imports from OPEC had decreased by almost 70%, to 1.5 MMb/d, while imports from Canada had increased by more than 135% to 3.8 MMb/d. Imports from other non-OPEC countries, in turn, had fallen by almost 60% to 1.5 MMb/d, and imports from Mexico — a subset of the non-OPEC countries — had plummeted by more than 60%, to about 600 Mb/d.

The trends generally continued in 2020, which like this year’s baseball, basketball, and football seasons will have an asterisk because of COVID-19 and its broad impacts. In the first nine months of this year, imports from OPEC averaged about 930 Mb/d, while imports from Canada averaged 3.6 MMb/d, and imports from other non-OPEC countries averaged 1.5 MMb/d — Mexico’s slice of that averaged about 690 Mb/d. There were also big shifts in imports on a PADD-by-PADD basis.