Paul Horsnell Quotations

The potential consequences don't even bear thinking about. There's such a concentration of refineries and chemical plants in a relatively small area that anything of that kind of intensity would be extremely nasty.

We believe that Iran matters more than is currently priced in, and that Iran's external relations remain the key wildcard.

But the scale of the fall remains beyond that which would be expected, given the difference in supply lines, and regardless of its motivation it still raises the question as to how inventories for the driving season can be built in a timely fashion.

Some of these refineries will not be back to full operation, perhaps well into next year.

We are in the middle of a fairly ferocious energy price spike. The spike could be checked by a move back towards normality in Venezuela, or by a release of U.S. strategic reserves. However, the application of either of these brakes does not look particularly imminent, and in their absence the upwards pressure is likely to continue.

We knew that things were getting fairly stretched and there was exposure to potentially even small shocks, but that is not a small shock, ... it's an absolute, monstrous hurricane.

There is no instant turnaround. It could take five years, six years or seven years.

Even before the hurricane there was no slack in the refining system, ... Now it's at breaking point. Those refineries will take months to come back online.

The Russian statement is clearly bullish, as the market expectation of any support for OPEC from Russia has increased from its previous level of zero.

The shortage is in gasoline, so you would need to add huge amounts of crude oil to have even a minor impact on prices. This is a time when the shortage has nothing to do with crude oil, and OPEC cannot fix it.

Developments are continuing to enforce a very downbeat view on prospects for the Iraqi oil sector. In all, the recently increased number of analyses implying imminent and unavoidable price collapses do seem a little premature.

The most immediate concern remains Iraq, where the prospect of further severe political and economic setbacks appears to be increasing.

It's a downward drift that's been going on to close to three months now. And there's no dynamic that brings it around for the moment, so we can keep on drifting down.

The U.S. inventory situation remains extremely tight, with total inventories still falling and gaining no ground on the five-year average.

The issue of Iran's international relations continues to rise to the fore as a major potential area of market concern. It now seems likely that the EU3 of Germany, UK, and France will later this week abandon the mothballed talks with Iran.

In effect, the member nations of the IEA have decided to attempt to regulate the upper bound on prices. They did that by using what mechanisms they had, however blunt and imperfect they might be.

If you had a magic wand solution, your magic wand would give you a few more refineries within the US system,

The market faces the prospect of years without sufficient flexibility or insulation from shocks during a period of extreme geopolitical stress.

The initial question is where is the 2 million barrels going to come from.

The industry has gone through such a contraction that getting it to expand again is proving difficult. These companies are not equal to the sum of their parts.

The market seems to have pushed far too far, far too fast and on the basis of far too little hard information.

The maximum amount of oil product that can be managed into the U.S. is two million barrels a day. Logistically, it's quite challenging.

The loss of short-haul heavy crude oil imports into the U.S. market is now becoming significant. None of that effect is currently in the U.S. weekly data, although it can be expected to depress imports in at least the next two weeks of data.