Suez traffic delays continue

Traffic through the Suez Canal remains congested days after efforts to free the container ship Ever Given succeeded, data supplied March 31 by Lloyd’s List Intelligence show.

Ever Given passed north through the Suez Canal on March 29 to a staging area in Bitter Lake, where it was awaiting inspection to determine if it was sea worthy. The Panamanian-flagged vessel lodged in the Suez on March 23, upending global maritime traffic.

Data sent to NGW from Lloyd’s show 307 vessels with deadweight tonnage of greater than 25.9 million still in line to pass through the canal. That is 65 less than its previous count on March 29. Of those, around 30 are crude oil tankers and a dozen or so vessels are carrying LNG.

The Suez handles about 8% of the global shipments of LNG and about 10% of total crude oil. NGW was unable to independently verify the count provided by Lloyd’s.

Given the prolonged bottleneck, some maritime traffic is diverting around the Cape of Good Hope. The Baltic and International Maritime Council, the largest international shipping association, issued a security alert March 26 warning that vessels headed to the cape were exposed to threats from Somali-based piracy.

Rystad Energy said March 30, meanwhile, that global maritime shipping delays should not be as severe as first expected.

Commodity prices experienced wild swings during the week ending March 26, but have cooled ever since as the market awaits news on April production levels from OPEC and its allies.

Brent crude oil, the global benchmark for the price of oil, was trading up 0.11% as of 8:20 a.m. ET to $64.24 per barrel. Natural gas on the New York Mercantile Exchange was up by a percent from the previous close to trade at $2.65/mnBtu.