If the Donald does not wish to bring down upon himself the ignominy of being the first US president to be impeached, convicted and removed from the White House by the US Marshals, he damn well better start reading the Iranian settlement proposals.
Even if he doesn’t like the first sentence, as he boasted.
I looked at it, and I don’t like the first sentence.I just throw it away.
That’s because he doesn’t have “all the time in the world” to find an off-ramp from his Iranian War disaster, as he claims. In fact, the dual blockade he has triggered in the Persian Gulf is fast draining the world’s working stockpiles of a broad array of commodities. About 30 million BOE/day (barrels of oil equivalent) is ordinarily generated inside the Persian Gulf and exported to the global economy, including petroleum in all its product variants, LNG, LPGs, sulfur, helium, aluminum and more.
In the case of petroleum products alone, the stockpile drain is now turning into a torrent, as we reach the 76th day in which normal Persian Gulf export volumes have been reduced by 90% or more. And although the current inventory balances look big because stockpiles are measured in the billions of barrels, the picture is deteriorating far faster than its appears to be on the surface.
In the first place at the onset of Bibi & Trumpy’s foolish war on Iran, global commercial stocks of crude and products combined were unusually high at about 8.5 billion barrels, owing to a modest surplus of production versus consumption during the last two years.
However, it should also be noted that the true recent baseline for global commercial petroleum stocks is a fair amount lower or about +/- 8 billion barrels per the graph above. So there was an extraordinary cushion of about 500 million barrels at the start of the war, but that’s already long gone.
Moreover, the aberrantly high levels shown for Q1 2020 (9 billion barrels +) doesn’t really provide any useful benchmark because that was strictly due to pandemic-based worldwide shutdowns of normal economic activity in consumption sectors ranging from cancelled global airline flights, to reduced trucking and rail mileage, to domestic travel and commuter-based curtailment of gasoline use.
Secondly, when you look at the normal global commercial stocks of about 8.0 billion barrels from the bottom up, it quickly becomes apparent that most of these barrels are spoken for and are not available as inventory cushion to prolong the Donald’s apparent waiting game. For instance, there is normally about 1.0 billion barrels in transit on the blue water in tankers, but those barrels are not some kind of floating surplus; they are actually the product of physics and current shipping technology.
To wit, it takes between 20 and 40 days for most global waterborne transit to get to Japan, China, Taiwan, Korea or Rotterdam or the US Gulf coast from the Persian Gulf, among dozens of other in-take points. Over any reasonable period of time, the the VLCCs which transport most of the global waterborne inventory are not going to get any bigger or travel any faster.
Source: Antiwar.com
