By admin 
Oil trading major Glencore has been buying spot cargoes of Middle Eastern crude grades for a Singaporean refinery it has recently acquired from Shell, anonymous traders have told Bloomberg.
Glencore has bought in recent weeks at least three cargoes of Qatar’s Al-Shaheen crude and at least one of Abu Dhabi’s Upper Zakum of 500,000 barrels each for February loading, according to Bloomberg’s sources.
Glencore is expected to be a more active player in the physical oil market going forward as it is now procuring crude for the Bukom refining and chemicals complex in Singapore, which Shell has sold to a joint venture company of Chandra Asri Capital and Glencore Asian Holdings Pte. Ltd.
Glencore, Trafigura, Vitol, and the other major independent traders have been snapping up refineries and retail network assets that the biggest international oil and gas producers are divesting as part of strategic portfolio realignment.
In this way, commodity traders gain direct access to a refinery to which they can send part of the crude they sell and become larger players in the crude options and futures market to hedge their exposure to physical crude oil.
In recent months, the largest independent oil trading houses have acquired several refineries from Big Oil worldwide in consortia with other companies.
Vitol Group signed a deal last year to buy 35% of the Saras refinery in Italy after reaching an agreement with members of the Moratti family.
Last month, ExxonMobil said it had completed the sale of the Fos-sur-Mer refinery in France, its only processing facility in the Mediterranean region, to a consortium composed of Entara and Trafigura.
The commodity trading industry currently has the means to reinvest strategically in long-term deals and strategic decisions, according to consultancy Oliver Wyman.
One winner move for reinvesting the profit windfalls could be to invest in assets, “which gives traders greater optionality and influence over the commodities they trade,” Oliver Wyman said in a report earlier this year.
By Tsvetana Paraskova for Oilprice.com