AMSTERDAM - Warm weather, surging gasoline demand and Chinese exports threaten to swamp distillate storage before the market recovers, industry experts said at the Platts Oil Storage conference in Amsterdam. The unusually mild winter, coupled with refineries running hard on cheap crude to feed gasoline demand, is pouring more distillates into the world’s tanks. “Potentially, we are going to get to tank tops,” Shell chief economist Chris Midgley said of distillates, adding that the El Nino weather pattern, one cause of the mild winter, had “killed demand” for heating fuels. Distillate stores usually shrink in the winter, when households across the Northern Hemisphere burn them to keep warm. Stocks in Europe’s Amsterdam-Rotterdam-Antwerp hub hit record levels in the autumn, according to industry monitor Genscape, making the market particularly reliant on falling temperatures to free space. Instead, the International Energy Agency blamed a mild winter for a one-year low demand growth in the fourth quarter; distillate demand in the developed world grew by just 60,000 barrels per day (bpd), well below the five-year average of 455,000 bpd. While there is still space to store, particularly in the United States, Midgley and others said soaring refinery output, particularly from massive new Middle Eastern distillate-focused units, and the entrance of China’s independent “teapot” refineries to export markets this year could join with the warmth to overwhelm tanks. “There’s only so much you can do in a refinery to switch to gasoline,” said Jared Pearl, chief commercial officer with VTTI, adding that China’s refineries, in a rush to produce gasoline, were “pumping out distillates ... it’s gotten imbalanced.” The IEA expects 2016 gasoline demand growth to outpace distillates again, as slowing industrial activity hampers distillates. Even if U.S. drivers scale back their trips in 2015, Midgley, called the fuel-price-induced boom in SUV sales a “a 15-year legacy to the oil industry.” And Ellen Ruhotas, managing director of Ratio Group, noted that a sanctions-free Iran will look to the international market for its gasoline for the first time in years, pegging its demand growth this year at 10 percent. All of these factors will keep refineries pumping diesel, and could force traders to turn to floating storage, something expensive freight has thus far prevented on a large scale. “It may end up being stored despite the tanker rates ... if it has nowhere to go,” said Simon Chattrabhuti, head of tanker market analysis with Clarksons Platou Shipbroking.