Guest Analyst
June 12, 2001

Holy Cow !!
by Azteca de Oro

API was surprisingly lower by 13.2 million barrels of crude stocks to total now at 312.2 million barrels. While gasoline went up by 6.3 million barrels, the temporary disruption that occurred at the beginning of the week COULD affect the tanker schedule and affect the inventories to the downside further.

Now, I always speculated that the recent run up on the past 2 months of about 30 million of barrels of crude stocks, could have been due to Saudi releasing its Caribbean stocks of about this size. If this speculation is close to reality, then Saudi is refilling its Caribbean tanks now, while Iraq has shutdown exports..... this would cause a DOUBLE squeeze. On top of this, Ecuador has stopped recently a 400,000 bbls pipeline due to a landslide.... It would seem that all is not well.....

Lastly, I found that large tanker shippings from middle east have really slowed with the last 2 weeks at the slowest level since 1997. Therefore, crude stock supplies will diminish in perhaps 45 days in the US on top of everything......

Azteca de Oro is an Oil and Gas Analyst published frequently at Le Metropole, the cyberspace cafe where you'll find more monetary analysis in one hour than you'll find in the Wall Street Journal in 12 months. Believe it.