BAGHDAD: Iraq’s biggest oil exports in more than three decades and winter winds are helping to keep shipping rates at a six-year high as a four-mile line of supertankers waits to load the nation’s crude.
There are 22 of the industry’s biggest tankers, or almost 5 percent of the fleet, waiting to collect cargoes from the Basra Oil Terminal in the Persian Gulf, from where most of Iraq’s crude is shipped. The daily rate for supertankers transporting crude from the Middle East to Japan rose to $51,042 on Thursday, bringing the average for this year to $61,306, data from the Baltic Exchange in London show.
Iraq’s oil output is rising faster than any other nation in OPEC as supplies from its southern oil province expand even as Islamic State fighters seize parts of the north. Tankers leaving Basra in the past week waited an average of 16 days, ship tracking data compiled by Bloomberg show. That compares with about 10 days normally, said Odysseus Valatsas, chartering manager at Dynacom Tankers Management in Glyfada, Greece.
“The fact is it will definitely affect the market,” Valatsas, whose company’s biggest tankers can transport about 28 million barrels of crude, said by phone Thursday. “The more ships that are missing in the market, the higher the chance the market has to go up.”
Iraq’s crude exports jumped 15 percent last month to 2.98 million barrels a day, the highest in 35 years, Oil Ministry spokesman Asim Jihad said by phone from Baghdad on Wednesday. The nation pumped 3.7 million barrels a day in March, the most since at least 1962, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.
