Rory Johnston

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 had, you kept resetting the clock and all the while markets kept loosening because of China's kind of pullback on imports.

So 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 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.

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...

wished they had them, like India.

You've seen a lot of examples of countries building.

Adnok, the Emirati natural oil producer, has now made plans for a 50 million barrel commercial strategic stock in India coming out of this.

So I think 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 underwater 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.