By Naureen S. Malik

 (Bloomberg) – At least 163 tankers.

That’s what number of cargoes of pure fuel it’d take to wipe out the ever-expanding glut of the heating and power-plant gasoline within the U.S. A gentle winter and manufacturing nonetheless flowing out of America’s shale formations have inventories swelling in contrast with earlier years, dragging down U.S. fuel costs at the same time as the primary export of shale fuel prepares to go away from Cheniere Energy Inc.’s Sabine Pass terminal in Louisiana in the present day.

“Production keeps going and right now we are pricing in a natural gas-ageddon,” mentioned Phil Flynn, senior market analyst at Price Futures Group in Chicago. “How many tankers do we need to to get rid of the glut?”

In a testomony to how huge America’s pure fuel provides have grow to be (they’re close to a seasonal file), it’d take a minimum of 163 tankers the scale of the Asia Vision, the vessel at Cheniere’s docks, to deliver U.S. fuel inventories again to the five-year common. If you lined them up finish to finish, they might stretch about 30 miles (48 kilometers), simply lengthy sufficient to ring the perimeter of Manhattan.

And the probabilities of this fleet out of the blue displaying as much as whisk U.S. fuel away are slim. Initial exports will probably be too small to make a dent within the U.S. provide surplus anytime quickly, mentioned Jason Schenker, president of Prestige Economics LLC in Austin, Texas.

“It’s hard to find much of a bullish story,” Schenker mentioned. “We see low natural gas prices for the balance of this year.”

Natural fuel futures fell 0.4 cent Wednesday to settle at $1.778 per million British thermal models on the New York Mercantile Exchange.

© 2016 Bloomberg L.P