September 10, 2024 [Oilprice]- Gunvor Group, one of the world’s biggest independent oil traders, traded a record volume of crude oil and petroleum products in the first half of the year, largely driven by a growing number of deals to move oil from the United States, the group’s chairman Torbjorn Tornqvist told Bloomberg.

Gunvor traded a record volume of 79 million tons of crude and products in the first half of 2024, Törnqvist told Bloomberg in an interview on Monday.

The rise in oil trade volumes is mostly due to more and more deals Gunvor has been agreeing to move U.S. oil and products.

“We built up a quite substantial export business out of North America, even though we only started three or four years ago,” Tornqvist told Bloomberg on the sidelines of the APPEC conference in Singapore.

Gunvor is building on its recent expansion in the United States and continues to work into its markets in Europe and in Asia, the executive said.

In the two years of energy market turbulence in 2022 and 2023, Gunvor amassed more than $6 billion in equity and has retained earnings in recent years. This surge in equity now allows Gunvor and the other major oil traders to expand their business or diversify into new investments.

The top energy commodity traders are now looking to invest part of the cash they have earned.

Some of them have embarked on a buying spree to acquire refineries that the biggest international oil and gas producers are divesting as part of strategic portfolio realignment.

While Gunvor has been setting records in its oil trading business this year, it is not overly optimistic about global oil demand for 2024.

Gunvor’s Tornqvist told Bloomberg today that the group expects oil demand to grow by only 1 million barrels per day (bpd) this year, much slower than previously expected.

That’s about the same forecast as the conservative estimate of the International Energy Agency (IEA) and twice lower compared to OPEC’s projection of 2 million bpd growth.