Shale Oil Boom Leaves the World Awash in Light Sweet Crude - Bloomberg

Shale Oil Boom Leaves the World Awash in Light Sweet Crude - Bloomberg:

Look at much of what is written about the oil market and it may be tempting to conclude that crude oil is a homogenous commodity, the same the world over and seamlessly interchangeable. It’s not. 

Once you appreciate that all crudes are not created equal, you can see how important it is that long-held expectations for a glut of the heaviest types have turned out to be incredibly wrong. Not a producer or refiner in the world is immune to this development, which is having a growing impact on prices and supplies.  


Crude oil consists of a soup of molecules made up of varying numbers of hydrogen and carbon atoms – hence, hydrocarbons. The composition of crudes from different oil fields, and even from different parts of the same oil field, can diverge sharply. Many contain pollutants that have to be removed, with sulfur the most prevalent.