The factoid thrown around is that roughly 20% of the world’s oil supply travels through the Strait of Hormuz. Since it closed, my local gas prices in one area of the US midwest have gone from $2.60 to now $4.10 presumably as reserves have been used up.
I could understand a 20~30% increase in price to correlate with the reduction in supply, but what are the economic factors that lead to what feels like such a disproportionate increase?
I posted this in another thread the other day but it bears repeating.
It’s not even really about the refineries not getting any oil supply. Refineries are setup to use SPECIFIC oil feedstock chemistries, if you try to substitute that oil for a different type (light sweet vs heavy sour or mid mid, etc) the process either doesn’t work, or it wastes a significant chunk. To convert a refinery to use a different feedstock, it takes a significant amount of engineering time, then you have to effectively SHUT DOWN the whole unit, redo parts of the equipment, then run it back up, test it, and tweak the process variables. Refineries plan this years out and it takes 6+ months to do if nothing goes wrong. Then, they are basically locked into that new feedstock again.
Doing any kind of supply shock like this is dumb for any number of reasons. It’s even dumber when the critical components to rework the refineries is in shorter supply because people keep blowing up the existing equipment. Lead times on some of this stuff is in the 20+ month range duing normal times.
There will not be an easy adjustment, the 10-20% loss in supply figure is misleading at best. This is going to impact everything that uses oil, plastic, fertilizer, lubricants, valves, electronics, etc and its not going to be a 10-20% impact…