Trafigura Clears Floating Forties Crude It Kept Since November. Contango!

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-01-24/trafigura-clears-floating-forties-crude-it-kept-since-november.html

Trafigura Beheer BV, the third- largest independent oil trader, cleared the North Sea Forties crude it stored on board the supertanker Genmar Hercules, according to AISLive data on Bloomberg.

The very large crude carrier had anchored off Southwold, England, since loading the crude in mid-November at Hound Point, the terminal for Forties shipments in Scotland, AISLive data show. A London-based spokesman for Trafigura asked Bloomberg to e-mail its questions when reached by phone and hasn’t replied to the query. A VLCC can carry about 2 million barrels of oil.

The supertanker had a draft, or depth in the water, of 20.90 meters since leaving Hound Point before dropping to 10.3 meters on Jan. 21, suggesting the vessel emptied its cargo before embarking for Rotterdam yesterday, according to the data. The ship’s design draft, the maximum depth it can go to, is 22.5 meters, Lloyd’s Register-Fairplay data on Bloomberg show. That implies the vessel was fully loaded at Southwold.

“They don’t see prices going much higher so it’s time to sell at peak of winter demand,” Andrey Kryuchenkov, London- based vice president of commodities research at VTB Capital, said in an e-mail.

Forties crude was a discount of 5 cents to the Dated Brent benchmark compared with 56 cents on Jan. 6. At these prices “it is only logical to book profits,” he said.

In the last week of December, Trafigura offered Forties for loading from the supertanker on the trading window run by McGraw-Hill Cos.’ Platts pricing agency without finding a buyer, according a survey of traders involved in North Sea Oil transactions. The grade is one of four used to price the Dated Brent benchmark. The others are Brent, Oseberg and Ekofisk oils.

The Genmar Hercules has been chartered to load a cargo of either crude or fuel oil from the North Sea to Asia Jan. 30 at a cost of $3.1 million, according to tanker reports from agencies including Optima Shipbrokers Ltd. and Imarex Asia Ltd.

To contact the reporter on this story: Sherry Su in London at Lsu23@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Stephen Voss on sev@bloomberg.net