Exploring the drivers of bunker fuel prices : from a ship owner's perspective

• Main Author: Li, Shengnan.
• Other Authors: School of Civil and Environmental Engineering
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: 2010
• Subjects: DRNTU::Science::General::Economic and business aspects; DRNTU::Engineering::Maritime studies::Maritime management and business
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10356/39398
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

The project is aimed at figuring out factors that influence bunker prices and examining how they exert their influences. Apart from the other two reports done by my teammates, this report focuses more on the building of correlation models to facilitate the predicting of short-term bunker prices and other points of views which are relevant to ship owners -- the buyers of bunker fuels. In the context of increasingly high bunker prices and high consumption of bunker fuels by ships, bunker costs have taken up as much as 60% of ship running costs. Therefore it is of great importance to ship owners to keep a close eye on bunker prices developments and properly predict bunker prices on a short-run basis in view of ever changing market conditions. Aimed to help ship owners find out factors which influence bunker prices ups-and-downs, this project managed to sort out some correlations between bunker prices and market indexes such as WTI/Brent crude price, Euro to USD exchange rate, BDI and container throughputs using regression analysis. There are also factors which can influence the future bunker prices trend, such as the global economy and world trade, general supply & demand of bunker and sudden events & political issues.