9 Comments

Thanks, this is a great piece.

Did you put CTL into this? EIA has China doing 124kbpd of CTL in 2021 (possibly higher now), and I think most of that is going into diesel/naphtha. I realise that might be even more diesel to account for...

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Most of that now goes to petchems so captured by refinery flows numbers.

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I saw an answer on Chinese fuel demand. Saw some research suggesting that public road transport is being replaced with private car travel in China (obvs a climate disaster if true, but not relevant here). Comp to 2019 highway bus passenger-km is -60% but private car satnav routing requests are +90%.

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Which would explain strong gasoline but not really the crazy strong diesel numbers.....

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I have felt this way with regard to iron ore. Property sales down 40-60%. FAI private sector proportionately weak. Yet steel production up. Commentators say "well, it is EV's, and solar / wind capacity installation, that's why steel demand remains strong". But then why is copper, lithium, scrap all so weak. Your oil analysis above seems to match well.

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1/ What is the shelf life of diesel?

2/ Where are China's underground oil storage caverns located?

The US SPR caverns are fairly close to the coast:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_Petroleum_Reserve_(United_States)#/media/File:Strategic_Petroleum_Reserves,_United_States.jpg

3/ Is any spare capacity in the caverns substituted with water to prevent the caverns collapsing?

4/ S&P suggest Chinese refiners are still not having enough quota allocation to meet their

refining capacity:

https://www.spglobal.com/commodityinsights/en/market-insights/latest-news/oil/091223-chinas-qualified-refineries-hungry-for-remainder-2023-crude-import-quotas

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1. Depends. Gasoline is short, diesel i hear various opinions of up to 12 months+.

2. Various places a lot in caverns near the coast but plenty of places nobody seems to know. That's how they roll....

3. Yes that's how you maintain an SPR you pump water in to get oil out and pump water out to put more oil in. This collapse meme is a bit ridiculous imho....

4. Like most sectors they are wildly overcapacity.

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Preparations to minimize impact of sanctions and supply chain changes due to a conflict or war.

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China stores 6 months of oil and 30 months of meat and cereals in its strategic reserves.

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