Oil rose for a third straight week as demand remained resilient, while supplies are frayed across the OPEC+ coalition and beyond.
West Texas Intermediate for February delivery fell US$0.56, or 0.7 percent, to US$78.90 a barrel on Friday, but gained 5 percent for the week.
Brent crude for March delivery fell US$0.24 to US$81.75 a barrel, also rising 5 percent this week.
Kazakhstan’s biggest oil producer has altered output at the giant Tengiz field following protests, while Libyan production has also been crimped.
However, restrictions on access to restaurants and gyms from Germany to Hong Kong were a reminder that the Omicron variant of SARS-CoV-2 could still curb demand.
“The oil market remains very tight and seems like it will go higher,” said Ed Moya, Oanda Corp’s senior market analyst for the Americas. “But energy traders are concerned curbs across Europe and Asia could threaten the short-term demand outlook.”
This week, OPEC+ announced its plan to stick with a scheduled output boost of 400,000 barrels a day for next month.
However, the group is unlikely to meet the threshold as some members have struggled to achieve their targets in previous months. Production in Libya has declined amid militia unrest, while Russia also failed to boost volumes last month. Nigeria, beset by disruptions at loading facilities, pumped just 1.35 million barrels a day of crude last month.
Oil futures have firmed into a bullish backwardation structure, signaling growing supply tightness.
“The recent oil-price rally has clearly been supported by the supply side, with production issues in Nigeria, a deep-freeze disrupting oil flows in Canada and northern US, and disappointing production numbers from Brazil, Russia and OPEC” wrote Helge Andre Martinsen, senior oil analyst at DNB Bank ASA in Oslo.
The operator of Kazakhstan’s Tengiz field, known as TCO, declined to provide further details on the size of the output adjustment, but it said that production operations were continuing.
TCO is a joint venture led by Chevron Corp that pumps about one-third of the nation’s oil.
A deep freeze in Canada and the northern US has also disrupted oil flows this week. That has coincided with shrinking US crude inventories, which have declined every week since November.
Meanwhile, Canada’s oil sands producers were able to export a record amount of crude to overseas markets thanks to a new link to the US Gulf Coast.
The recent reversal of Marathon Pipe Line Inc’s Capline pipeline is sending oil sands crude produced in landlocked Alberta to export terminals on the Gulf Coast where it can be shipped to other countries.
Exports to Asia were at their highest ever, with India the leading destination by far, followed by China and South Korea, oil analytics firm Kpler said.
Additional reporting by AP
‘SWASTICAR’: Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s close association with Donald Trump has prompted opponents to brand him a ‘Nazi’ and resulted in a dramatic drop in sales Demonstrators descended on Tesla Inc dealerships across the US, and in Europe and Canada on Saturday to protest company chief Elon Musk, who has amassed extraordinary power as a top adviser to US President Donald Trump. Waving signs with messages such as “Musk is stealing our money” and “Reclaim our country,” the protests largely took place peacefully following fiery episodes of vandalism on Tesla vehicles, dealerships and other facilities in recent weeks that US officials have denounced as terrorism. Hundreds rallied on Saturday outside the Tesla dealership in Manhattan. Some blasted Musk, the world’s richest man, while others demanded the shuttering of his
ADVERSARIES: The new list includes 11 entities in China and one in Taiwan, which is a local branch of Chinese cloud computing firm Inspur Group The US added dozens of entities to a trade blacklist on Tuesday, the US Department of Commerce said, in part to disrupt Beijing’s artificial intelligence (AI) and advanced computing capabilities. The action affects 80 entities from countries including China, the United Arab Emirates and Iran, with the commerce department citing their “activities contrary to US national security and foreign policy.” Those added to the “entity list” are restricted from obtaining US items and technologies without government authorization. “We will not allow adversaries to exploit American technology to bolster their own militaries and threaten American lives,” US Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick said. The entities
Minister of Finance Chuang Tsui-yun (莊翠雲) yesterday told lawmakers that she “would not speculate,” but a “response plan” has been prepared in case Taiwan is targeted by US President Donald Trump’s reciprocal tariffs, which are to be announced on Wednesday next week. The Trump administration, including US Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent, has said that much of the proposed reciprocal tariffs would focus on the 15 countries that have the highest trade surpluses with the US. Bessent has referred to those countries as the “dirty 15,” but has not named them. Last year, Taiwan’s US$73.9 billion trade surplus with the US
Prices of gasoline and diesel products at domestic gas stations are to fall NT$0.2 and NT$0.1 per liter respectively this week, even though international crude oil prices rose last week, CPC Corp, Taiwan (台灣中油) and Formosa Petrochemical Corp (台塑石化) said yesterday. International crude oil prices continued rising last week, as the US Energy Information Administration reported a larger-than-expected drop in US commercial crude oil inventories, CPC said in a statement. Based on the company’s floating oil price formula, the cost of crude oil rose 2.38 percent last week from a week earlier, it said. News that US President Donald Trump plans a “secondary
RSS