Weekly Energy Recap: Oil prices deteriorated

RIYADH: On the week’s closing, oil prices deteriorated and made the first weekly drop in three weeks. The Brent crude oil price dropped to $62.95 per barrel, while still trading in the narrow range between $61 and $65 for more than three weeks.

The WTI crude oil price dropped to $59.32 per barrel but has still been trading in the narrow range between $58 and $61 for three weeks, as most of Europe and the US were partially on holidays and some investors may have positioned themselves ahead of the holidays and therefore affected the market one way or the other.

Now that it looks like the US is adding 916,000 jobs for March, it may give traders the idea that more demand is coming into the picture, despite the fact the EU is still in lockdown. That might keep the upward momentum dampened a bit but, on the other hand, it still looks bullish as global oil inventories continue to fall and Brent’s futures price curve remains backwardated.

Oil prices are still moving in a narrow range, despite the OPEC+ plan to increase output, returning 2 million barrels per day (bpd) over the coming three months, despite the increasing lockdown measures.

Though the US Energy Information Administration (EIA) has acknowledged the heightened uncertainty of oil demand recovery, EIA April’s Short-Term Energy Outlook (STEO) report again forecast rising prices for both Brent and WTI. EIA forecasts Brent crude price to average $62.28 per barrel in 2021 and $60.49 per barrel in 2022. EIA forecasts WTI to average $58.89 per barrel in 2021 and $56.74 per barrel in 2022.

EIA forecasted global oil demand to average 97.7 million bpd in 2021, which is higher by 5.5 million barrels per day from the 2020 global oil demand average.

EIA has lowered its forecast for the US oil production to average 11.04 million bpd this year, while last month EIA’s STEO forecast was 11.15 million bpd. EIA reported US crude inventories fell by 3.5 million barrels to 501.8 million barrels and expects that gasoline prices could hit their highest in three years this summer.

The latest figures from the Commodity Futures Trading Commission on April 6, 2021 showed that long positions on crude oil futures on the New York Mercantile Exchange numbered 655,327 contracts, down by 20,166 contracts from the previous week (1,000 barrels for each contract). It is the fourth consecutive weekly drop in positions.