LONDON: North Sea Forties crude differentials edged up slightly on Wednesday as Total returned to the market seeking October barrels and the Buzzard oilfield went offline again.
The new shutdown follows outages on Sunday and Monday, as the 200,000 barrels-per-day field has struggled to return from seasonal maintenance.
As a result of Buzzard's stop-start progress, traders are concerned there could be further delays to September loadings, although none were reported on Wednesday.
So far, the field's troubles have failed to provide much support to North Sea crude differentials or Brent futures prices .
Traders said there were plenty of competing West African barrels around, whilst Libya's oil output has now risen to 810,000 barrels per day (bpd).
"I think short of a big supply disruption like Libya going offline again, which is certainly possible, it is hard for Brent to snap out of this contango," one trader said.
Output from 11 of the main British and Norwegian crude streams tracked by Reuters is set to average 1.892 million barrels per day (bpd) in October, up 11 percent from a revised 1.702 million bpd in September.
Traders were doubtful that local refinery demand would be sufficient to absorb these extra barrels, whilst analysts warned that the large volumes of crude oil already in storage would have to be worked through first.
FORTIES:
Vitol sold a Forties cargo loading on Sept. 24-26 to Statoil at dated Brent minus 65 cents.
This was in line with the last Forties deal, which was for a Sept. 18-22 ship-to-ship transfer.
Total bid for Forties loading on Oct. 5-7 at dated Brent minus 45 cents.
EKOFISK/BRENT:
Trafigura bid for Ekofisk loading around Sept. 20-25 at dated Brent plus 18 cents or Sept. 25-31 at dated Brent plus 11 cents under terms where one bid cancels out the other if it is taken up.
BP offered its Brent cargo loading on Sept. 28-30 at parity with dated Brent. This was a little weaker than its last offer for the same cargo on Tuesday, which came at dated Brent plus 10 cents.
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