The global oil market is set to shift into inventory building in a trend that should boost tankers, Clarksons Platou Securities said.
In a note published on Monday, the bank said the International Energy Agency (IEA) forecast that oil production would exceed global oil demand, pushing the market to buy more oil, rather than pulling from reserves.
“A move from inventory draws to inventory builds will almost certainly result in a more dynamic tanker market,” the firm said.
The IEA said global inventories would increase around 900,000 barrels per day for the rest of 2022 and 500,000 barrels per day for the first half of 2023.
Clarksons Platou Securities said if the market flipped from backwardation, where the spot price is higher than the futures price, to contango, where the opposite is true, long-haul voyages would benefit.
“We expect that both crude and product tankers will gain momentum in the coming months,” said the investment banking unit of shipbroker Clarksons.
Tonne-miles would benefit further from the European Union embargo on Russian crude oil and oil products coming into effect in February 2023, as 1.3m barrels per day of crude and 1m barrels per day of products would have to find new homes.
Rising global oil demand as the Covid-19 pandemic recedes is one of the factors that tanker owners and others expect to boost the market, which limped through the back half of 2020 and all of 2021 before showing some improvement this year.
On Monday, the Baltic Dirty Tanker Index rose 13 points to 1,488. The assessment has added 51 points since 4 August.
Meanwhile, the Baltic Clean Tanker Index fell 16 points to 1,407, its third consecutive day of losses.
Both indices saw jumps following Russia's invasion of Ukraine on 24 February, as global oil trading patterns shifted with many countries beginning to shun Russian oil and others willing to take the barrels at a discount.
