International buyers’ appetite may start to wane in 2018 US light tight oil output is transforming world oil markets. After falling during the 2015 oil price crash, total American production – of which shale is now a major source – surged back onto markets, and the Energy Information Administration (EIA) expects output to rise another 0.5m barrels a day in 2018, to a record 9.9m b/d. Much of this new production is finding its way onto global markets, and exports now regularly run over 1m b/d. But can there be too much of a good thing? Specifically, with Opec ‘s light sweet crude exporters Libya and Nigeria staggering back from extended production outages, and big Persian Gulf producers tightening availabilities of middle-gravity sour crudes, is there a “demand limit” to the volumes of very light sweet crude now produced in the US? Several factors suggest that there is, and […]