Pirates Briefly Rattle Oil Market

Do pirates have the ability to move oil markets?

If only for a few hours, it seems that they can. Oil futures spiked Monday morning just as news broke that Somali pirates had nabbed a Saudi Aramco-owned super tanker named Sirius Star off the coast of Kenya. The huge ship can carry up to 2 million barrels of oil.

Just before 9 a.m., oil futures stood at $56 a barrel. By 10 a.m., they rose $3 to nearly $59. But the price effect — if there was one — was short-lived. By noon, oil prices were back to their now-familiar downward slide and were trading in negative territory.
To be sure, figuring out how breaking news affects commodity and equity markets always involves some guesswork. Other factors may also have boosted oil prices as markets opened in New York on Monday, including a report confirming that OPEC was making good on recent promises to cut oil production, analysts said.

But analysts said there was great interest among oil traders in news that pirates can disrupt major oil tanker traffic. There is some longer-term concern that if attacks continue, they would force a rise in insurance costs for shipping companies. In addition, shipping costs would be significantly affected if oil companies decide to shift their routes to avoid pirate-infested waters.
“Clearly, pirates can move the markets a little bit on a knee-jerk reaction,” said Mike Wittner, head of oil market research at Société Générale in London. “But in the grand scheme of things, this super tanker is not going to change the complexion of global markets by itself. Two million barrels mean a great deal to their owner, but we’re talking about an 87-million-barrel a day global market for oil, every day.”

A few shipping companies have already begun to reroute their ships to avoid the pirates. On Monday, the Norwegian shipping group Odfjell, which specializes in chemical tankers, said it would shun the Gulf of Aden for the safer if much longer route around Cape of Good Hope. There have been some 70 pirate attacks in and around the Gulf of Aden so far this year.
“We will no longer expose our crew to the risk of being hijacked and held for ransom by pirates in the Gulf of Aden,” the company’s chief executive, Terje Storeng, said in a statement.
Danger is nothing new to oil markets. Compared to the rebels in Nigeria and the ongoing violence affecting pipelines in Iraq, the Somali pirates seem relatively tame, said John Kilduff, senior vice president at the brokerage firm MF Global in New York. But oil traders, he said, are watching the situation.

“It is generating great interest, but whether it is a sufficient threat to oil and energy transportation to significantly move markets, I don’t think is likely at this point,” he said.

 

Source: The New York times