TOLD YOU. Geloof mij, Shell heeft een fantastisch trading resultaat over Q2.
By Javier Blas and Lars Erik Taraldsen
(Bloomberg) -- In March and April, as oil prices plunged to
their lowest in a generation, Norwegian energy giant Equinor ASA
was busy doing the opposite of what oil companies usually do:
pumping as much crude as possible underground into giant caverns
on the nation’s North Sea coast.
Equinor also filled oil tankers with crude, turning them
into floating storage facilities, and put even more barrels into
onshore tanks elsewhere. Its traders were trying to soften the
blow of rock-bottom prices by buying cheap crude, storing it,
and simultaneously selling it on the forward market at higher
prices.
The trade, known in industry jargon as a contango play,
combined with other oil trading activity delivered a record of
about $1 billion inpre-tax adjusted earnings in a single
quarter. And the Norwegian oil company wasn’t alone: it’s a
pattern likely to be repeated throughout the industry from oil
majors such as Royal Dutch Shell Plc to independent commodity
trading houses like Glencore Plc.
The trading units of Shell, BP and Total handle more than
25 million barrels a day of crude and refined products -- equal
to a quarter of global consumption. The trio don’t disclose
their trading results separately, and many investors consider
the operations essentially black boxes. But in the past they
have said that contango plays are extremely profitable, able to
give a $500 million boost in a single quarter to their trading
businesses.