Aramco's Nasser: usable oil stocks are scarily thin and may take two years to rebuild
Victoria Shinder1 min readSaudi Aramco chief executive Amin Nasser warned that the world's oil supply cushion is "scarily thin", speaking at the Energy Intelligence Forum in London on Monday 5 October, Euronews reports.
His numbers.
- Global oil inventories stood at about 10 billion barrels at the start of the crisis.
- Nearly 3 billion barrels of supply have been lost since, roughly half of the crude and products that would normally have passed through the Strait of Hormuz in that time.
- More than 1 billion barrels have been drawn from global inventories to offset the losses, mostly from onshore commercial stocks.
- Of the remaining stock, under 6 billion barrels, much is "not practically available"; of headline commercial reserves, "less than 10%" can actually be used, because much of what countries report is the minimum needed to keep infrastructure running.
Drawing on inventories buys time but does not fix the imbalance, he said: the volumes could help the world through one winter, and rebuilding stocks after the strait fully reopens could take up to two years. On the G7 and IEA agreement on Friday to release 100 million barrels of diesel and crude, he said total inventories do not reflect what can actually be supplied.
The other side. Crude exports from the Gulf excluding Iran returned to pre-war levels in September, according to Kpler data cited by Euronews: at least 16.5 million barrels a day left the region between 1 and 28 September. About 40% of those exports now bypass the strait, against 17% before the war, mostly through Saudi and UAE pipelines.