Show HN: I simulated closing the Strait of Hormuz on real oil trade data

An interesting fact to consider is that the US stockpile (the Strategic Petroleum Reserve) is reported as the total of sour (high sulfur) and sweet (low sulfur) crude oil. The sweet stock makes up about 1/3 of the reserve and hardly varies at all. This is because US refineries are virtually all configured for sour crude: due to a mistaken belief in the 1990s that sweet crude was running out, the industry bet the farm on sour crude refining, and if sour crude runs low, it's extremely economical to switch.

As a result, almost all the draw from the SPR is of sour crude (currently ~5 million barrels/week). However, you can't just use up all the reserve because as levels get lower brine must be pumped into the storage chambers to retain pumping pressure, and the more brine that is pumped, the more the output quality declines.

The weekly reports indicate a total in the SPR of about 300mbb, of which ~100 are sweet and 200 sour. But for the reasons above, output becomes unusable one the sour levels fall to ~140-150mbb, at which point there is almost certainly a severe diesel supply shock. At current drawdown rates, that would be sometime around October/November, right in the middle of harvest season when demand for diesel is highest.

There's more complexity to this than I want to type out in a HN comment, but not that much more. Draw your own conclusions.

Tangentially related but just watched this pretty interesting youtube mini-doc-thing about the recent moves China has been making regarding oil (and its bigger picture): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BkA0bkb6ZO0

Nice that you allowed readers to customize the parameters! I personally thought the demand demand elasticity was too low and I was able to adjust it.

What concrete predictions does your model make?

What developments in pricing/other would indicate that your model is wrong or incomplete?

Nice website regardless, but I'm a bit skeptical that the dynamics of the global oil/energy market can be accurately predicted.

Very interesting. Here in India people were very concerned about potential cooking gas shortages (LPG) when the disruptions began which is also a good example of usually-overlooked dependencies on the the Strait

I don't know if I'm doing something wrong, but if I set Capacity Retained to 100% then no matter what I set the other values to a bunch of countries deplete their reserves.

This feels wrong; but I'm inclined to think I'm missing something.

Are emergency stockpiles calculated correctly? China should not be the first to be exposed.