Rory Johnston

Those are the ships that we're seeing rise very quickly in terms of their exit pace out of Hormuz again.

But because that is the stockpile, the floating oil available in Hormuz is drawing down faster than it is being replenished with new loadings.

The pace that we're seeing come out of Hormuz right now also is inherently unsustainable and it self-represents

some kind of stockpile release from a stockpile that was not accessible to the market in the Gulf to now a stockpile that is accessible to the market in the broader market, in the broader world.

But that's right now what's running up against the lack of Chinese import demand.

Yes.

And I think part of that, too, again, remember that the oil market was exceptionally weak prior to this.

Now, flat price is rising because, as you noted, I think there was this kind of precautionary kind of geopolitical premium being built in.

But on the eve of the war, the last week before the war, we saw prompt rent also dipping into contango.

That was your sign that we had too much supply.

So I think that that was exactly what happened.

So I think that what I would have said at the time is we knew we were going to get IE member state strategic releases.

We probably were also going to get some kind of, or at least at the time, the thought would have that we might have get some kind of Chinese release, or at least they would have stopped stockpiling.

But still at the time, I would have found it very implausible that they reduced imports by 5 million barrels a day.

I think it's, in terms of the scale, I think that yes, there could have been a little bit of reduction there.

But even in hindsight, it's still very, very surprising the scale of reduction we saw.

The other thing I think is that

The other question that I, you know, if I was to go back and kind of challenge my own, challenge myself, I'll do the meta meta here.

I would say that, okay, we had this big surplus beforehand.

Everything looked very, very bearish.