Alex Longley, Lucia Kassai, and Alaric Nightingale of Bloomberg report how tankers booked for Venezuelan oil have now been stuck for months, racking up a payday for the vessel’s owners. They write:
A batch of oil tankers that were supposed to load oil from Venezuela have been idling off of the country’s coast for months, offering a headache for some of the traders that got back into the country’s oil trade when sanctions were eased — and a payday for owners of the vessels.
Four supertankers, able of hauling 8 million barrels of oil between them, have been stuck near the Latin American country since December, vessel tracking data compiled by Bloomberg show. […]
The delays mean the ships have been racking up millions of dollars of bills without delivering cargo.
Charterers who book vessels sometimes have to pay a waiting fee called demurrage. For some of the ships near Venezuela, those rates are above $100,000 a day, people familiar with the matter said. It means a three-month delay could cost $9 million.
Read more here.
What’s Causing the Backlog?
Marianna Parraga of Reuters reports that PDVSA does not have enough exportable crude inventories to accelerate deliveries. Parraga writes:
A bottleneck of vessels waiting to load crude and fuel in Venezuela has increased in recent weeks as state-run oil firm PDVSA struggles to deliver cargoes on time, according to people familiar with the matter, documents and shipping data.
PDVSA has sought to ramp up shipments this month, the documents and data showed, following setbacks in January as outages at Venezuela’s main port hit its exports. But the increase has been insufficient to ease the congestion.
As of Monday, at least 19 supertankers were waiting to load near Venezuela’s Jose and Amuay ports, where most exports are shipped from, up from about a dozen at the end of November. […]
A possible lack of crude to fulfill all cargoes negotiated since October could force some ship owners to leave Venezuelan waters empty handed in coming months if Washington reimposes the sanctions, even after having waited for months to load, according to the people.
