MBIE issued an urgent update<\/a>, clarifying that some vessels listed as \u201con water\u201d and more than a fortnight away were in fact discharging fuel or arriving within the next few days. The clarification boosted the stocks of diesel that were in New Zealand or on the way for the period up to April 12 to 46.4 days\u2019 worth.<\/p>\n![\"Tracking]()
Tracking from Starboard Maritime Intelligence shows six fuel tankers heading to New Zealand remain on schedule.<\/p>\n
Starboard analyst Mark Douglas said the ongoing conflict had caused traffic through the Strait of Hormuz \u2013 a key chokepoint for oil exports out of the Gulf \u2013 to diminish significantly.<\/p>\n
A handful of vessels were still transiting daily, typically keeping to the coastal waters of Iran, but Douglas said significant commercial traffic had dropped from 60 passages a day on average before the conflict to just five.<\/p>\n
Douglas said second-order effects, chiefly on refineries that process crude oil from the region into useable fuels, had begun to be felt in our part of the world.<\/p>\n
\u201cSingapore is readjusting its supplies and looking at other sources, Africa and further afield, and seem to be using more smaller tankers to keep their flow of fuel up. And Japan and Korea are certainly also scrambling to get their fuel levels up too,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Gulf producers had also activated pipelines to shift oil to ports beyond the Strait of Hormuz, but Douglas said this could not \u201cquite make up for the entire infrastructure of the Gulf\u201d.<\/p>\n
Douglas said New Zealand\u2019s incoming tanker traffic had showed a shift in behaviour.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe are seeing vessels that are saying that they\u2019re headed into New Zealand, and they\u2019re taking interesting, possibly longer routes, which indicates that maybe the owners haven\u2019t quite decided where the fuel is going to go yet. The vessels, where they\u2019re saying they\u2019re going is just an indication, and they\u2019re still open for buying on the world market,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Douglas said he and Starboard would continue monitoring incoming tanker traffic, but the real risk for New Zealand would come from a prolonged closure of the strait.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s seeing a tightening of all the supply chains, because it\u2019s not just the fuel that the tankers are carrying \u2013 it\u2019s also the fuel that supplies the ships that come here. It\u2019s the routing of vessels to be able to pick up fuel, where they can get it, and come to the countries where they need to go,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Douglas said the movement of containers \u2013 both empty and full \u2013 was also a risk that spilled over into exporting generally.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe easy answer to the medium-term outlook is all about risk: the longer this goes on, the more acute the risk is,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Matt Nippert is an Auckland-based investigations reporter and ICIJ member covering white-collar and transnational crimes and the intersection of politics and business. He has won more than a dozen awards for his journalism \u2013 including twice being named Reporter of the Year \u2013 and joined the Herald in 2014 after having spent the decade prior reporting for business newspapers and national magazines.<\/p>\n
Stay ahead with the latest market moves, corporate updates, and economic insights by subscribing to our Business newsletter<\/a> \u2013 your essential weekly round-up of all the business news you need.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"While transmitting data does not break down the type of fuel carried \u2013 petrol, avgas or diesel \u2013…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":334799,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[3105,168660,2082,2678,266,42,191,53906,16609,5829,30506,29391,117,43,155638,425,4156,3111,185417,8808,25439,4739,643,19862,177420,1361,8229,40,38,41,39,6149,6923,540,24750,2963],"class_list":["post-349260","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-data","tag-examines","tag-for","tag-fuel","tag-government","tag-headlines","tag-here","tag-incoming","tag-iran","tag-many","tag-matt","tag-mean","tag-new","tag-news","tag-nippert","tag-now","tag-oil","tag-out","tag-reassure","tag-running","tag-scrambles","tag-six","tag-stocks","tag-supply","tag-tankers","tag-that","tag-they","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories","tag-war","tag-what","tag-where","tag-zealanders","tag-zealands"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/349260","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=349260"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/349260\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/334799"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=349260"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=349260"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=349260"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}