Rory Johnston on Why His $200 Oil Prediction Didn't Turn Out Right

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Despite this scenario, the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, the thing that oil analysts had talked about as a tail risk event for years and years and years actually happening. No. It is really remarkable. It's one right at the end of March and then one right at the end of April basically and the closing price right around just a little bit shy of 120, both of those days. But no, absolutely not. Like some of the Doomsday scenarios at least for now. Their crossings are picking up. I guess negotiations are ongoing of some sort. Like no, they clearly, the Doomsday scenarios about how this couldn't even stay closed for a few weeks let alone two or three months did not panic. I see a lot of people on Twitter/X making fun of the barrel counters right now. Which I have a lot of sympathy for barrel counters because I like my analysis to be grounded in facts and numbers. But there is clearly a disconnect here between what happened with the price and some of those predictions. Well, maybe we learned something. Maybe we learned something about the oil market in the last few months. We've gotten a lot of requests for this episode and so we are going to talk to someone that we talked to right at the very beginning of the war. Someone who talked to a lot, someone whose oil analysis greatly respect even if this particular incident did not perhaps pan out the way he and many others, almost all the others expected. We're going to be speaking with Rory Johnston. He is the founder of the commodity context newsletter. And maybe he learned something about the oil market in the last few months. So Rory, thank you so much by fan request and a request because we want to learn something too. By fan request, welcome back to the podcast. Thanks for having me guys. Let's just start with like, what was, let's start with like, okay, early March. Remind listeners what this sort of your take and this sort of general wisdom was, you know, first couple of weeks of March about how long this could persist and why this, remind people why the straight of hormones was seen as sort of the choke point among choke points when it comes to oil. Yeah. So let's transport ourselves back to our last conversation. I think it was the first time travel machine music, right? I think an idea. So yeah, the reason that it was such a massive deal and still remains, I would say, I mean, while we have avoided the Doomsday prophecies, it is still the by far the largest supply disruption in the markets history. And for the numbers, for the barrel counting for Tracy, the total flow through hormones prior to the war was roughly 20 million barrels a day. Now, we knew we weren't going to lose all of that because we knew that we had some offsets, you know, the Saudi East West pipeline, the Imradi pipeline to Fuzera on the Gulf of Vomon. But overall net net netting for all of those known rerouting options, which again, at the time we didn't know if they would fully work because they never fully tested, but they did work, thankfully, but even netting of those, we were still down roughly 13 million barrels a day of Gulf oil production excluding Iran that had been forcibly shut in through the duration of this crisis and is only now beginning to pick back up again. That's a lot of oil. That's 13 plus percent of the global supply. And the reason we thought that prices were going to hit $150 or even $200 a barrel was that when you have a supply shock that large without any more offsets, you end up at demand destructive pricing really, really fast. And to destroy that level, the depth of that demand, we had never seen that before, but $200 a barrel seemed like the reasonable price at which that would happen. Now, thankfully, we did not have to destroy that demand and what we will talk about shortly, I'm sure, is all the ways in which the system adapted and flexed. And I think we saw this most notably above all in China. Yeah. Okay. Well, why don't we just dive into it? Give us your overview on what happened and why we didn't actually hit $200 a barrel. Yeah. So it's a the two biggest things. One on the fundamental, so on the barrel accounting side was China. We always knew that China had huge stockpile oil, but we didn't know how they were going to react to this crisis. And what we've seen through this crisis is that Chinese oil imports, crude oil imports into China, the world's largest crude oil importer, fell by upwards of five million barrels a day between their, you know, the three month average prior to the war through to June. Now we're not quite done this month, but that's roughly where we're trending for June so far. So what five million barrels a day was upwards of half of the total spot market supply hit to Asia. And that allowed a lot of those other Asian importers to basically not have the competition that they would have had for the barrels they were importing. So the countries that were hit hardest by this crisis and the governments that were most panicked, governments in South Korea, Australia, Japan, Taiwan, etc. There was a period where like the Prime Minister of Australia was coming out daily and announcing the Australian government's successful acquisition of a cargo of diesel. Like it felt very COVID. Now those importers saw imports collapse through March and April, but through May and into June they actually recovered basically to pre-war levels. And the largest facilitator of that was the fact that China was not competing for any of the other barrels and it had absorbed so much of the shock itself. Just on China specifically, I have so many questions already, but do you have any sense of how much of this was genuine demand destruction or substitution in China versus just releasing from stockpiles? It's a good question and the far more answers we do not have 100% certainty is to what the exact composition of that swing was. We know the oil going in fell by five to six million barrels a day given products as well, but in terms of the actual demand destruction, the thing that we have seen across China is that all of the mobility indicators. And you guys are actually in China very recently. All the mobility indicators showed no notable decline. The level of implied demand destruction that we see and importantly here, China does not publish official demand data. It also doesn't very importantly publish official inventory data. So we're left kind of feeling around the shadows. The implied demand destruction we saw through this crisis was on par was the steepest demand destruction implied in history and on par on the volume with the COVID-0 demand shock in 2022. But you guys were in China. I have not seen any reporting that indicates that level of lockdown. So we start asking questions, okay, what's going on in the middle? Also, when you look at typically, you'd assume that that level of demand destruction without COVID-0 lockdowns would have had to be driven by massive price increases. But part of what also happened to this crisis is that China had basically throttled the ability of domestic retail prices through their normal regulatory procedures. This is a petrol and in Beijing only rose maybe 30% versus the doubling we saw globally. So again, it just doesn't track for me that all of that or even most of that was demand destruction. So then we go to this point of substitution or outright releases of strategic petroleum reserves. Now, the one thing we can say is that the inventories we can see, these are the floating roof storage tanks for crude oil. Those are still very, very high. And roughly where they stood at the beginning of this crisis. So as far as we can tell, they're not drawing down aggressively on those stocks at least not yet. But caveat there is that we can't see through those satellite analyses. We can't see underground storage tank, underground storage caverns and their proper SPR. They have six storage caverns at least that we know of about 131 million barrels. The likelihood is that they have been drawing down those because the following crude oil imports fell far faster than the decline in refining run rates. So again, it had to be made up somewhere. So we're just kind of feeling around the shadows for the Occam's razor here is that they have been releasing silently additional crude inventories. But above and beyond that, we know that crude refining run rates also fell dramatically by three to three and a half million barrels a day. So where's the implied demand destruction? Now, this is where we either get one of two things. We either get a very large release of refined product stocks. Now, we know that China has large stocks of refined products like gasoline, diesel, jet fuel, etc. We have virtually no firm information on those stock levels or contract them very closely day to day or week to week because unlike crude, they don't have fl- they don't have floating roofs that we have to kind of again, infer those stockpiles upwards of a billion barrels. But the implications that they're drawing them down very, very, very rapidly. The other thing we could have seen is and your colleague, Kavi Blast, was on this very early, was on the potential to switch some of the petrochemical feed stocks from oil-derived products like NAFTA and LPG towards more gas-based products, natural gas, or even extreme cold-based chemical products. That could again have a switch on the margin. And then the other thing that you hear is that, like, well, China has massive penetration of electric vehicles. So maybe that was making part of it as well. But the challenge is that it's not the sales penetration, the sales composition that drives fuel demands, the fleet composition. And while new energy vehicles in China are like 60 plus percent of new vehicle sales, the overall stock of vehicles in China is still 10 to 1 internal combustion engines to EVs. So the application would have to be that Beijing had this massive fleet of EVs, they're like waiting to roll off the line. And I just doesn't seem plausible on the timeline we're talking about. That is a very important step to keep in mind. And I didn't know the exact numbers, but I do think that's important because we all, yeah, we talk about the declining oil and intensitivity of the Chinese economy due to growing EV sales. You know, it's going to take a while before it really swings and enough to make a difference. I think, you know, you don't think they have a secret stock pile of EVs. They have a strategic pork reserve. They just swap out everyone's cars, like everyone gets a free EV for a few months. And you get an Apollo. You know, it's really cool about the Chinese EVs. Yeah. Or sorry, the Chinese automatic driving vehicles, all cars, whether they're the official like robot taxis or when you're in a car that you push on self driving mode, they have this blue light that shows up. So it's not like the typical red light. And so you could see every single car on the road in China that is currently operating in an autonomous manner and know if there's a few minutes. Yeah, it's pretty nice. You know, you mentioned Tracy at the beginning of the episode barrel counting. I think one of the reasons I like we like talking to Rory is that I do consider you to be a humble barrel counter because it's so easy and oil conversation to get tempted by grand threads about geopolitics, right? Because it's sort of intertwined. So I really do appreciate the humble barrel counter. But when we talk about this sort of like China's willingness to either draw down stocks, etc. There's two sort of related questions that I have is like one is could China just be like had done its neighbors a solid in the sense that it's like, you know what? We really do have quite a big buffer. And we know that Singapore and Taiwan and Korea are really going to be Japan are going to really be under strain. So from like a sort of soft power, goodwill thing like we don't really need to be adding and be given that we know and be given the EV penetration even if it's small now it's going to grow is the consensus in oil world that the massive stockpiles in China do they exist in the event of like preparation for a theoretical war, which would be a very oil intensive process. Yeah, so let's work on reverse there. And I think so back in 2023 I wrote a piece called Chinese Oil Demand Dance, which was about how in 2023 with this massive growth in Chinese apparent demand again, remember China doesn't official doesn't publish official demand stats. It was so big and China was still pretty weak coming out of COVID zero at that point. It didn't seem plausible and I kind of speculated that maybe they were building refined product stocks, which we can't see because of the way we calculate this stuff. And at the time the worry was that it was an anticipation of a war or an invasion of Taiwan at that stage, you had an increased bellicosity of Beijing, a lot of saber rattling them buzzing airspace naval drills, etc. So I think that was definitely part of it. That was the thought at the time. Now what we've seen is that obviously came in very, very handy. Now for much the same reason, although not getting blockaded through Malacca, but just the lack of Hormuz itself, which again was always part of China's kind of strategic or perception of strategic precarity of its stockpiles. And but I think to this point of like why this is the question that like continues I can you do obsessive out because it also kind of tells you like when they're going to re-enter the market because as we will talk right now, not only are crude oil prices collapsing, but we've actually seen prompt rent time spreads, the difference between the first and the second contract actually flipping to outright contango today. So I think it's a particular, we're swimming in oil, at least relative to demand. And I think part of that is that China just still hasn't stepped back in as a competitive importer. So to your point, Joe, this idea that like maybe Beijing was playing the altruistic neighbor, which I think is I think one of the theories I'm holding as well, which is not only do they want to kind of be seen as the good neighbor, not only do they want to be seen as kind of standing up and defending its neighbors when very clearly in there in their telling Washington is abandoned you and kind of stuck you with this massive energy crisis. The challenge I think with that I want to think also if China is trying to pivot away from the US market. It's only other market options are Asia or Europe really in terms of like a sizable sources of demand. So it's not its interest to see those economies kind of collapse while North America remains relatively insulated given domestic supplies. I think the only challenge with this theory is that if that was true, I would have expected China to say something about it. And the fact is that so far we have seen we've heard virtually nothing from Beijing or any of the regulatory authorities that this is happening, why it's happening or the scale of what we're talking about. The other I think more nefarious option and you were just talking about how I'm a humble barrel counter. I don't like to go grand strategy, but I think there is like the put my tinfoil hat on for a second. Why would China do this and not talk about it? The other option I still think this is less likely because it seems very nefarious, but we had the Trump administration visiting Beijing a couple months ago. At the time, it seemed like nothing much came out of those meetings. It seemed pretty lukewarm at best. But I think there's a chance that you saw some kind of discussion between the Trump administration and Beijing over like help us out with this and we will do something for you in the future. Now what could that be? One of the things that was happening at the time was with all of the military equipment destroyed in the Middle East from the Iranian attacks, lots of advanced radar systems, anti-ship anti-aircraft missiles, etc., etc. Washington began migrating all of its kit that had been in Asia back over to the Middle East. So maybe this is part of this broader kind of done-road doctrine that Trump sees himself as pulling out of Asia and maybe someone somewhere made that point and said like if you help us, we'll keep this going. That said, I again, I don't think any of this perfectly fits. And I think the easy answer is that it remains a mystery as to why China is doing this. The only problem is that given that we still don't understand why China did this or even to that degree, how exactly they managed to pull it off, it makes it difficult to handicap when they're going to enter back into the market because obviously a 5 million barrel a day swing is massive in this context. And right now, I think part of the reason that that crude prices and time spreads are back into contango today is that we have this rising surge of exiting trends instead of hormones that are running up against a still relatively weak import market driven first and foremost by China. Hi, I'm David Weston. Join me every week for the Wall Street Week podcast to hear stories of capitalism from around the world, from geopolitical tensions and central bank decisions to artificial intelligence, energy and infrastructure. We sit down with the CEOs, economists, policy makers and thought leaders whose decisions are shaping markets everywhere we find them. Subscribe to the Wall Street Week podcast on Apple, Spotify or anywhere you listen. So China isn't the only one that's been releasing from stockpiles. So the US also has a strategic petroleum reserve and I think we were getting pretty close to the operational minimum on that thing. And Jeff Curry, who's been on the podcast a number of times, he had a really good line basically saying this is not supply responding to price. It's inventory responding to price and inventory unlike production has a floor. So devil's advocate question, but like if this kept going, if the hormones shuts again or if it hadn't been opened in recent days, and I guess I should mention we're recording this on June 24th, could that inventory response have gone away and could we see prices shoot up? Absolutely. When we started this crisis, we had been in a surplus in the oil market for upwards of a year. We had built substantial stockpiles, both commercial and strategic, obviously in the case of China strategic. We were as buffered as humanly possible to weather this shock. I still didn't think it was enough at the time and that proved up to be thankfully incorrect. But now we have drawn down massive volumes of oil to put in perspective the that 13 million barrels a day of Middle Eastern productions and shut it. The cumulative volume of that to date is roughly 1.3 billion barrels. Like we're talking massive, massive gobs of oil. The collective IA SPR release at its upper end is pegged at about 400 million barrels. The cumulative reduction in Chinese imports over this period, again relative to three months prior to the war is between four and five hundred million. So at least on that basis alone China swung as much and likely more than the collective IA member states and what I will say about SPRs in my modeling in my menu. model, I think about SPRs, not as inventory per se, but as discretionary supply and demand. That when you think about the effect of inventories on prices, and I think they are the primary thing that drives prices and perceptions of scarcity, it's mainly the commercial kind of merchant inventories that catch the residual, the remaining surplus or deficit after all said and done, that drives that kind of marginal pricing influence. But an SPR release as an example manifests as in the market as new supply, not new production, but new supply that wasn't available before. We're actually seeing another stock or strategic stock release of that kind in a way right now in Hormuz itself. We've had for this whole period, we've had well over 100 million barrels of oil trapped in Hormuz, these are the ships that have been trapped and unable to escape. Those are the ships that we're seeing rise very quickly in terms of their exit pace out of Hormuz again, but because that is the stockpile, the floating oil available in Hormuz is drawing down faster than it is being replenished with new loadings. The pace that we're seeing come out of Hormuz right now also is inherently unsustainable and itself represents some kind of stockpile release from a stockpile that was not accessible to the market in the Gulf, to now a stockpile that is accessible to the market in the broader market in the broader world. But that's right now what's running up against the lack of Chinese import demand. First of all, I have a very short question. The start of the year Brent was around 60 and on the eve of the war was 70. Just real quickly, would you say a non-trivial amount of that $10 barrel increase was, I mean, people were talking about the risk of war all year. Would you say at least some of that was driven by war premium already rising before the initial strikes? Yes. Okay. And I think part of that too, again, remember that the oil market was exceptionally weak. Yeah, yeah, yeah, higher to this. Now, flat price is rising because as you noted, I think there was this kind of cautionary kind of geopolitical pre-embeing built in. But on the eve of the war, the last week before the war, we saw Brent also dipping into Contanga. That was your sign that we had too much supply. So I think that was exactly what happened. So right now oil is like, again, just below 74 and like 70 on the eve of the war, not necessarily reason to think that that's a floor given what we know about the world swimming in oil. So maybe it could even go lower. All right. I'm going to try and do something that's like a very like we're all doing like self-criticism here, a theme of the day. So we're going to do like a sort of double counterfactual question. So if I had been a smarter interviewer in March of 2026, which feels like a long time ago, you know, I think I probably asked you, you know, it's like, okay, it's like, well, what about that pipeline that's how the Arabia has gone on? And I might have said, well, what about the role of SPRs or maybe even I might have asked something like, what about lowering sanctions on Russian oil, et cetera? I did not ask Rory China is importing so much more oil than it needs to operate its economy day to day. So if I had asked you, and so this is going to force you to put yourself in early March of mind. So let's imagine it's early March. And I say, Rory, but can't China just massively reduce its imports? They don't use that much oil to you, bunch of EVs. What would Rory in March 10th or whatever 2026? How would you have thought then if I had proposed that as a possible way out of this crisis? I like this game. So I think that what I would have said at the time is we knew we were going to get I, you know, IE member states strategic releases. We probably were also going to get some kind of, or at least at the time, the thought would have that we might have get some kind of Chinese release. Or at least they would have stopped stockpiling. But I still at the time I would have found it very implausible that they reduced imports by 5 million barrels a day. I think it's in terms of the scale. I think that yes, there could have been a little bit of reduction there. But even in hindsight, it's still very, very surprising the scale of reduction we saw. The other thing I think is that the other question though, if I was to go back and challenge my own challenge myself, I'll do the meta meta here. I would say that, okay, we had this big surplus beforehand. Everything looked very, very bearish. This was thought to be a temporary shock at the time. And it's inherently temporary because we all thought it wasn't going to be sustainable. Challenges is that when we think about fair value in the market, we think about the relationship between inventories and prices. Part of what we've historically seen is that when inventories get really low and prices get really high, the outlook for future balances is also pretty precarious. So what we see in this crisis is that going in, we were oversupplied. The future was looking even more oversupplied. So when you saw inventories drawing down towards tank bottoms, yes, if we hit tank bottoms and we actually hit that acute reckoning where you had to destroy them because there's literally nothing left, then yeah, you could have gotten this massive spike. But in terms of the market's weariness or concern about those lower levels, you could make an argument that, well, it doesn't really matter if they go low because we know they're going to get swollen again next year as soon as this is open. And I think that that's one thing that I may have misappreciated at the time. Even if I went into this crisis bearish, before flipping bullish during after Hormuz was closed, I still thought that Hormuz was such a larger kind of shock to the system that even going in with a 3 million barrel a day surplus, a 13 million barrel a day loss of production was still going to put you in an extraordinarily tight position. But again, I think that that's part of what I may have misconcured. I think the one final thing I'll say and the one thing I haven't mentioned so far and I think we should is the job. Is the fact that when I talk to traders, the one thing I heard time and time and time again is that, and these are like, these are prop kind of oil and product traders. They have their own models that show them fair value. They keep saying like all their models say this is a raging buy. But they got so blown out repeatedly in that kind of March and April period, all their risk management kind of limits have been throttled down by 90%. That there was this general, the quote was, "Everyone's bullish but no one's buying." And I think one thing I also deeply misappreciated going into this crisis was the potential power of Trump himself, more broadly, Trump administration, to inject so much downside volatility that it kind of arrested the normal melt-up process. And I think that if we had just had job owning, I don't think it would have been enough. If we just had China import contraction, I don't think it would have been enough to arrest that melt-up that we saw through March and April. But I think the combination of them proved to be especially potent that you kept resetting the clock and all the while markets kept loosening because of China's kind of pullback on imports. I think the combination of them proved to be way more powerful than I have ever expected. And I think going forward has really shown the degree to which the market, the oil market is much more resilient, at least in this kind of condition, to a big shock like that in a way that I just hadn't appreciated at the time. Can I just ask on the inventories and strategic reserves? So one of the bullish arguments I've seen, and there are still some oil bulls out there, they say, well, stockpiles are low now, so people are going to have to fill them up, right? And you're going to get maybe structural, structurally higher demand for oil for the next couple of years or so. Is that a theory that you buy into? People need to refill their oil tanks. Yes and no. And I think again it goes to that split between how I think about strategic and commercial inventories differently, or strategic stocks and commercial inventories differently. I think that yes, there will be an impetus to let's say refill the SPR in the United States, refill the SPR in Japan. Countries that didn't have SPRs going into this, that all of a sudden wish they had them like India. You've seen a lot of examples of countries building ad-knock, the Emirati natural oil producer has no way plans for a 50 million barrel strategic commercial strategic stock in India coming out of this. So that will structurally undergird demand for the next year or two or maybe even three, but I don't think that that demand is going to manifest as long as the market is tight. So you need to get back to a stage where the market is looser, otherwise you're just kind of retighten the market through SPR rebuilds. I think on the commercial stock, I think that is a situation where you kind of need a surplus in order to rebuild those stockpiles in the first place. So I do think that right now we are deeply under water on most global kind of trackable commercial stockpiles. And I think we need a period of surplus in order to get us back up to normal levels, but we probably don't need to get back to where we were. Say at the beginning of the crisis where we had abnormally high levels of inventories. That was fantastic. By the way, this reminds me, you know what an episode I really want to do and it's been requested actually by listener. We should do an episode about the $20 billion thing go day petroleum refinery that opened recently in Lagos, Nigeria. So this incredible engineering feat, one of the most important refineries in the world right now has been opened very long. Anyway, I was only reminded by that because of your point about maybe more countries are going to think about having SPRs in the first place. Rory Johnson, thank you so much for coming on. Really appreciate you. You know, I would like to talk about an incorrect call. I'm going to take your candor and come back on upload. Thanks for having me, guys. Thanks, Rory. We all learned something. Yeah, we all learned something. Me, me most of all. (drums) - Sure you see, I think I thought there a lot of interesting moving parts. I liked his point about the sort of intersection between the Chinese import reduction and the jaw boning, which at the time, I didn't put a ton of weight on it because I was like the barrel math is the barrel math. - Yeah. - But if it did, is he put it like, change the behavior of traders who might have, that point about their risk limits, but that's interesting. - Yeah, I was really interesting. And also, if you remember back in March sort of April, there was a lot of discussion of the disconnect between the physical market, where you couldn't get barrels versus the actual financial market, which wasn't showing that big price increase. - There were a lot of threads that I didn't totally understand, but it was a really weird time in the market. And it was absolutely true, that at least for several weeks, there were all those headlines about like, oh, in the Philippines, you can only drive to work two days a week or whatever. And so it was like a real crisis. It was not the headline print, crude barrel price never got to 200 or even 150, but it was like deep, deep stress. - Yeah, that's the thing. It's like the tension between people not being able to get oil and the prices actually not shooting up that much. But also, I think the big question that we're all left with is what's China thinking? - Yeah, that's a big way. - Like why they do it, right? We don't really know. And then just in terms of, I guess the short to medium trader question, will and when will they re-enter the market in the same levels that they were pre-war is like a really interesting question for people to watch currently. - I would love to see one of China's like oil caverns. - Oh, that would be good. Well, that would be good. - Let's do it. Let's do a road trip. - All right, shall we leave it there? - Let's leave it there. - This has been another episode of The All Thoughts Podcast. I'm Tracy Alleyway, you can follow me at Tracy Alleyway. - And I'm Joe Weissenthal, you can follow me at The Stoward. Follow our guest, Rory Johnston at Rory_Johnston. Follow our producers, Kerman Rodriguez at Kerman Armond Dash, you'll be in a Dashbot, kill Brooks at Kale Brooks, and Kevin Luzano at Kevin Lloyd Luzano. And for more odd lives content, go to Bloomberg.com/odlodford of the daily newsletter and all of our episodes. You can share about all of these topics 24/7 in our Discord discord.gg/odlodford. And if you enjoy Odd Thoughts, if you like it, when we follow up on wrong calls, then please leave us a positive review on your favorite podcast platform. And remember, if you are a Bloomberg subscriber, you can listen to all of our episodes absolutely at free. 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