莱茵河干旱推高燃料运输成本，柴油运费创纪录

This is Kamala Shelling and you're listening to Switched On, the Bloomberg NEF podcast. Water levels in the Ryan River right now are low. So low in fact that hunger stones or stones that are usually under the water but appear during exceptional drought years are reappearing. Traditionally, these stones were used to warn about drought fueled famines. But the low water levels have a profound impact on the continent's trade and energy systems, too.

As of this week, water levels in the Rine are expected to fall below levels needed for barges to pass safely, and freight rates for gas oil barges are soaring. With me today on this analyst reaction episode are Jess Hicks from BNF's weather team, and Clauddio Lubis, an associate in oil, to discuss their story, freight rates skyrocket in the EU as Ryan River runs low. BNF clients can find this and other relevant research by heading to BNF WeatherGo and BNF Oil Go on the Bloomberg terminal or at bnf.com.

If you'd like to learn more about how BNF connects the dots of the energy transition, visit us at about.bnf.com. And if you'd like to speak with a member of our team about becoming a client, email us at sales.bnf at bloomberg.net. But for now, let's talk about the Ryan River with Justin Claudio. [music]

Jess, welcome back to Switched On. [music]

Thanks, Kamla. And Clauddio, it's so great to have you here again.

Thank you. Great to be here.

If I were to walk into a pub this evening and say that I'd spent the afternoon talking to two BF analysts about a waterway where vessels are struggling to get through and that's throwing the energy system into disarray. The answer would probably be, "Oh, you're talking about the straight of Hormuz." And then I would get to say, "Oh, no, no, no. We're talking about a water system 5,000 km away." So, Jess, take us to Germany and tell us what's happening.

So where Germany is in central Europe, this area has spent much of the summer trapped beneath a persistent high pressure omega blocking pattern. An omega blocking pattern basically holds high pressure in one location. And so that atmospheric pattern can remain stagnant for days to weeks rather than um what we normally see in Europe and what we normally see in Europe where Atlantic weather systems roll through every few days bringing bouts of precipitation to different areas across the continent.

And so what happens is the jetream effectively becomes stagnant in place and storms are diverted from the region. And in this case, it's left Germany and specifically the Ryan River um under weeks of intense heat, almost no rainfall, and rapidly falling river levels in turn.

So, there's one particular point that I think we've been really focused on in Germany, and that's this town called Cowb. So, why there? What's happening there?

In this specific location, water levels along the river are quite low in general, and it is a key choke point along the river. Um what that means is that barges going through need to be cautious when river levels drop. And so when river levels do fall here, barge capacity, weight loads, they become restricted and transport becomes constrained. And so this in turn then causes freight costs to sore making moving things like diesel, heating oil and other commodities from Amsterdam, Rotterdam and Antworp uh that hub into Germany and Switzerland um it makes it much more expensive.

So you just said river levels are quite low. How severe are we talking?

So I'll start with the weather. Since the start of summer on June 1st to today, August 7th, uh rainfall across Germany has run 56% below the 10-year average. And this is in parallel with multiple heat waves hovering in the region, and those have pushed average temperatures up by 6%. When you have minimal rainfall paired with high heat, this helps dry out the region. And that's why we're seeing such a severe event at the moment for the Ryan River.

Now, as of August 4th, river levels at CowB broke a record low from 2018. Water levels at CowB dropped to a maximum height of 17 cm. So, that's a little less than 7 in, which is minuscule in the grand scheme of things. And this is well below levels needed for barges to pass through safely. And transit restrictions are in place. when restrictions are in place, u freight rates, what um we price for freights to move through the region.

As an example, freight rates for gas oil barges at the beginning of the week hit €190 per metric ton, and that's more than six times the 10-year average. But the spike hasn't really stopped since the beginning of the week. Today is August 7th, and right now, these rates are reading at €220 per metric ton. And I I don't know if you understand the gravity of this, but it's record-breaking and it's absolutely astonishing.

That is an absolutely astonishing figure. And I want to get into the market impact. But first, Clauddio, what is gas oil?

So gas oil is part of the middle distilled family of oil products across the barrel. So it sits between the lighter products like gasoline and liqufied petroleum gas and the heavier products like fuel oil that's used for shipping. And gas oil is very closely related to diesel and heating oil. And it's important because it touches a lot of the real economy. They're used in commercial transport, agriculture, construction and manufacturing, and even heating.

And it's often a key indicator of economic and industrial activity, particularly in Europe. So, anything impacting its balances will be closely watched for. For example, when gas oil markets tighten, the impact can show up very quickly in industrial and commercial activity, which can, you know, indirectly in turn feed into the broader inflationary pressures for regional economies. And so, to Jess's point earlier, any disruptions in the river traffic, for example, can quickly feed in through higher freight costs and tighter fuel markets across northwest Europe.

The timing also seems to be particularly problematic for these spiking gas oil prices right now. Why is that?

Yeah. So for European downstream companies and oil refiners to be specific, this is all brewing to be the perfect storm in a way. The middle distlits market um in northwest Europe. So that's not only diesel and gas oil, but also jet fuel and kerosene is already very tight and this has been driven by geopolitical conflicts not only in the Middle East that we're seeing right now, but also from the enduring Ukraine Russia war.

And you know the Iran war for one has curbed some supplies of these fuels to the region from the Persian Gulf and any recovery in export of trade is unlikely to be instantaneous because there's a lot of factors to consider. These include coordinated vessel movements, traffic sequencing across parties, insurance availability, and the need to clear out some of the sea mines across the street of Hormuz. And in more recent times, there is also another rising geopolitical hostilities happening in the region, specifically across the Red Sea, which is putting traffic at another choke point at risk, specifically the Babel Mandep straight.

And for additional context, Europe is structurally short of middle dist meaning that demand in the region for these fuels outweighs how much domestic refineries can produce, implying reliance on imports. And in a way this makes the region very sensitive to fuel supply security issues and also volatility. And then there's the Russia story where you know as you've seen over the past months and even weeks they've lost significant amount of operable refining capacity mainly due to strikes um drone strikes from Ukraine.

And this has in turn crippled a lot of their refinery run rates where we estimate that levels in June fell around 25% relative to their seasonal averages which is not insignificant.

What exactly is a refinery run rate?

So refinary run rates are essentially how much volumes of products refineries are producing as a share of their total na