West Africa Crude – India buys heavily, but backlog still big

Differentials for West African crude oil remained under heavy pressure on Friday, with a large portion of unsold cargoes for December loading still available, although heavy buying by an Indian refiner helped deplete the overhang.

IOC bought six million barrels of oil in a tender, bringing the total bought in the last month to 14 million barrels, a trader said.

“It may be because they bought less in earlier months, I think it’s the biggest purchase since January from them,” a trader said.

This helped bring the total available cargoes for December still available to 20 million barrels, from around 25 million earlier in the week. There were still around six cargoes for December export from Angola too.

Very few of the 67 cargoes Nigerian for January export have found buyers while there are still 29 Angolan cargoes, with one trader estimating that just three spot cargoes had changed hands.

The very high availability of oil helped to keep differentials low. “The market is very weak, sellers are very aggressive,” a trader said.

NIGERIA

* There were 20 million barrels of December-loading crude still up for sale, with some going into the IOC tender.

* Qua Iboe was heard traded at around 10-20 cents above dated Brent. There were three or four December loading cargoes of the grade available.

* Forcados was also slow to sell for December export, with around six cargoes still available, a trader said.

ANGOLA

* There were four cargoes still available for December export: CLOV, Dalia, Girassol and Nemba.

* Just over a dozen January loading cargoes went to term buyers.

* The total January export programme had risen to 1.59 million bpd on 51 cargoes, including four 1 million barrel cargoes of Plutonio.

TENDERS

* India’s IOC awarded three VLCCs, one each to Shell, Total and Vitol, traders said. The grades were not known.