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With regulatory approvals? Probably years.

The smart equivalent is to get a tanker ship and just float it out at sea until someone wants the oil (usually just west of Africa, where you can easily dispatch it to whoever ends up needing it.) Not sure if it works quite as well with WTI instead of Brent crude, though.



The cost of supertankers used for offshore storage has unsurprisingly also gone through the roof. Well over 100k USD per day.


They're already doing this & running out of capacity

https://www.forbes.com/sites/gauravsharma/2020/03/12/superta...


It is probably a fair and terrible assumption that others have thought of this already and that, in fact, tanker ships are filling up all over the place right now. Statistically, this means we're more likely for a spill, somewhere.


The Wall Street Journal writes today:

"Lease rates have soared for very large crude carriers, the 2-million-barrel high-seas behemoths known as VLCCs. The average day rate for a VLCC on a six-month contract is about $100,000, up from $29,000 a year ago, according to Jefferies analyst Randy Giveans. Yearlong contracts are about $72,500 a day, compared with $30,500 a year ago. Spot charter rates have risen sixfold, to nearly $150,000 a day.

Day rates rise as the spread between oil-futures contracts widens. The basic math is that every dollar in the six-month spread equates to an additional $10,000 a day that can be paid for a VLCC over that time without wiping out all the oil-price gains, Mr. Giveans said."

But there's plenty of Saudi oil going in as well.

I'm not sure that they're materially more at risk of a major spill than during normal operations.


On top of raw counts, we'll surely discover that somebody is using a tanker "unfit for purpose" because of the high demand for tankers.




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