Tankers carrying some 20 million barrels of crude oil are idling off the coast of California as onshore storage space runs out and the level of supply remains excessively high. Bloomberg reported that the tankers, which carry enough oil to satisfy a quarter of global oil demand, are scattered along the coast from Long Beach to San Francisco Bay. Analysts are warning that storing oil offshore on tankers as onshore storage facilities fill up could end up engaging a third of the global tanker fleet. This may not be as big pf a problem as it would have been at another time since the slump in demand for oil must have affected demand for tankers equally adversely–meaning there is free tanker capacity to use for storage. Demand for tankers to store oil has intensified significantly, the Wall Street Journal reported this week. “We’ve reached a point where there must […]