The 20 million Barrels of Oil Conundrum

Our analysts Andrew Sheets and Martijn Rats discuss why a prolonged disruption of oil flow through the Strait of Hormuz would be unprecedented—and nearly impossible for the market to absorb.Read more insights from Morgan Stanley.----- Transcript -----Andrew Sheets: Welcome to Thoughts on the Market. I'm Andrew Sheets, Global Head of Fixed Income Research at Morgan Stanley.Martijn Rats: I'm Martijn Rats, Head of Commodity Research at Morgan Stanley.Andrew Sheets: Today on the program we're going to talk about why investors everywhere are tracking ships through the Strait of Hormuz.It's Wednesday, March 11th at 2pm in London.Andrew Sheets: Martijn, the oil market, which is often volatile, has been historically volatile over the last couple of weeks following renewed military conflict between the United States and Iran.Now, there are a lot of different angles to this, but the oil market is really at the center of the market's focus on this conflict. And so, I think before we get into the specifics, I think it's helpful to set some context. How big is the global oil market and where does the Persian Gulf, the Strait of Hormuz fit within that global picture?Martijn Rats: Yeah, so the global oil consumption is a little bit more than a 100 million barrels a day. But that splits in two parts. There is a pipeline market and there is a seaborne market. And when it comes to prices, the seaborne market is really where it's at. If you're sitting in China, you're buying oil from the Middle East, all of a sudden, it's not available. Sure, if there is a pipeline that goes from Canada into the United States, that doesn't really help you all that much.Andrew Sheets: So, it's the oil on the ships that really matters.Martijn Rats: It's the oil on ships that is the flexible part of the market that we can redirect to where the oil is needed. And that is also the market where prices are formed. The seaborne market is in the order of 60 million barrels a day. So, only a subset of the 100 [million]. Now relative to that 60 million barrel a day, the Strait of Hormuz flows about 20 [million]. So, the Strait of Hormuz is responsible for about a third of seaborne supply, which is, of course, very large and therefore, you know, very critical to the system.Andrew Sheets: And I think an important thing we should also discuss here, which we were just discussing earlier today on another call, is – this is a market that could be quite sensitive to actually quite small disruptions in oil. So, can you give just some sense of sensitivity? I mean, in normal times, what sort of disruptions, in terms of barrels of oil, kind of, move markets; get investors' attention?Martijn Rats: Yeah, look, this is part of why this situation is so unusual, and oil analysts really sort of struggle with this. Look normally, at relative to the 100 million barrels a day of consumption, we care about supply demand imbalances of a couple of 100,000 barrels a day. That becomes interesting.If that, increases to say 1 million barrel a day, over- or undersupplied, you can expect prices to move. You can expect them to move by meaningful amounts. We can write research; the clients can trade. You have a tradable idea in front of you. When that becomes 2 to 3 million barrels a day, either side, you have major historical market moving events.So, in [20]08-09, oil famously fell from over 100 [million] down to something like 30 [million], on the basis that the oil market was 2-2.5 million barrel day oversupplied for two quarters. In 2022, we all thought – this actually never happened, but we all thought that Russia was going to lose about 3 million barrel day of supply. And on that basis, just on the basis of the expectation alone, Brent went to $130 per barrel. So, 2-3 [million] either side you have historically large moves. Now we're talking about 20 [million].Andrew Sheets: And I think that's what's so striking. I mean, again, I think investors, people listening to this, they can do that arithmetic too. If this is a market where 2 to 3 million barrels a day have caused some of the largest moves that we've seen in history, something that's 20 [million] is exceptional. And I think it's also fair to say this type of closure of the Strait [of Hormuz] is something we haven't seen before.Martijn Rats: No, which also made it very hard to forecast, by the way. Because the historical track records did not point in that direction, and yet here we are. The historical track record – look, you can look at other major disruptions historically.The largest disruption in the history of the oil market is the Suez Crisis in the mid-1950s that took away about 10 percent of global oil consumption. This is easily double that. So really unusual. If you look at supply and demand shocks of this order of magnitude, you can think about COVID. In April 2020, for one month, at the peak of COVID, when we're all sitting at home. Nobody driving, nobody flying. Yeah, we lost very briefly 20 ...