Vortexa’s Managing Director Clay Seigle reviews continuing events at the Suez Canal and discusses potential oil market repercussions.

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Our base case assumes that Suez Canal traffic, including oil and gas flows between East and West will resume soon, however, some operations and shipments are already running late. Vortexa’s preliminary intelligence indicates that 10 crude oil tankers carrying a total of 13 million barrels have already been or could soon be affected by the Suez Canal disruption, depending on its duration.

Watch the video to hear a detailed analysis on the cargoes stuck south of Suez. Whilst it has been noted that Sumed network and Israel’s Eilat-Ashkelon pipeline can transport oil, east and west of Suez, that’s going to be little comfort to refiners in the Mediterranean European area unless available tanker capacity in the Mediterranean remains sufficient for those final mile deliveries to those refineries.

The longer the outage takes, the more knock-on effects will materialise including a shortfall of sour crudes for European refiners and wider shipping delays affected the next cargo bookings.