‘It’s obvious you need China’: trader says tariff war must end if United States wants to cash in on booming oil volumes
- While American oil for export is up by a million barrels a day, refinement capacity struggles and trade sanctions deny producers access to a big, hungry market
The United States-China trade impasse will have to end for US crude oil exporters to find enough buyers to absorb dramatic annual growth of 1 million barrels per day in exports over the next few years, an executive at multinational commodities trader Trafigura said at an energy conference on Tuesday.
As markets adjusted to the US-China trade war and US crude shipments to China plunged in recent months, US exports to Europe and India have surged.
But much more US crude oil will have to be exported as production increases because refineries in the US have reached a ceiling on the amount of light, sweet crude they can use, according to Trafigura co-head of oil trading Ben Luckock.
Trafigura has applied to US regulators for permits to build an offshore crude export terminal off Corpus Christi, Texas, to transport 500,000 barrels per day of US shale to buyers in Europe and Asia.
It is one of eight groups vying to build an facility capable of fully loading supertankers – known as Very Large Crude Carriers or VLCCs – which can carry up to 2 million barrels of crude.