If this strike in the UK grows teeth wouldn't we likely lose that almost 70k bbl/day from them, plus perhaps more from the other European sources as the UK tries to import it's losses?

Seems that could put a real dent in inventories heading into the summer if the strike were to last several weeks.

I would have thought that the current round of MEND activity/strike action in Nigeria - one force majeure of at least 5 million barrels alone - is far more serious for US inventories than the short-term outage of relatively small quantities of gasoline from the UK/Europe.

Well, yeah that too for sure. But I was thinking finished product inventory, which Robert has pointed out the US leans on pretty hard nowadays.

The crude glitches could certainly make it more difficult for the US refineries to run up utilization rates, at the current crack spreads at any rate. $150 on the near horizon? $5-6/gal instead of $4 this summer? Starting to look really likely...

I could see a diversion of perhaps 500kb ( equivalent to 1/2 day's or so worth of imports ) of products being diverted from the US back to the UK.

This is an order of magnitude less than the force majeure due to the pipeline bombing alone. The US imports a cool million barrels of oil per day from Nigeria - so if the strike action that is being threatened there actually materialises, then the impacts from that will be much more serious.

Gas in the US at $4, oh my! Then again, look on the bright side: US gas prices, still waaaay cheaper than India ( really, someone should use that as a slogan ).

Heh-heh. Good slogan!

500k/day would put a real strain on US inventories if it were to go on for several weeks, and we would be hard pressed to make it up given the other "issues" floating around out there.

Ugh.

I was thinking of 500kb total of diverted exports to the US as a result of the stoppage, which would be equal to 9-10 day's worth of UK shipments.