Price Mouvement Recap
Due to the pressure from Donald Trump to reduce the price of crude, Brent as wellas West African Qua Iboe and Nemba prices were dropping down till the end ofNovember to less than $60 a barrel.
However, in the beginning of December, oil prices increased more than 2%. Saudi Arabia, Russia andother producers in OPEC decided to counterattack by cutting output in order to “drain” global fuel inventories and support the market. Consequently, Brent crude rose 2,9% to $61,70 a barrel.
Markets reacted well (hence the slight increase in prices early December) following the annoucement of OPEC. However, markets are still over supplied and therefore prices return to normal levels
Supply & Demand
Once again, high freight rates and weak Asian refining margins “kept buyers at bay” in West African market, which created a situation of unsold cargoes. Globaldemand growth of crude oil has weakened, especially from China, where refinershave a surplus of oil in storage.
“The Angolan market, which tends to be dominated by Chinese refiners, has beenslow to move. Traders said the Angolan market still has around 17 cargoes ofunsold January cargoes available, out of a total of 43 in the final loadingprogramme.” (reuters)
“The Nigerian market has suffered the most from freight rates and it’s heavily over supplied, to the tune of around 30 cargoes for December and early January,which traders said was “worrying” at this point in the supply cycle, with just a little over two weeks to go until the February loading programmes emerge.” (reuters)
Forward Curves
There is no significant change concerning the forward curves. It is still in a contangosituation and still better to store crude. Nothing has changed since the last bulletin.For September and October 2019 we can notice a slight decrease of the futureprice surely due to the output cut from the OPEC countries.
OPEC and selected non-OPEC countries agreed last week to cut their output by1.2 million barrels per day during the first six months of 2019. This 1,2millions bpdcut is based on the production of October 2018.
Most of the cuts will come from Saudi Arabia, with smaller contributions likely tocome from Russia, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait and Oman.
Other OPEC and non-OPEC countries are unlikely to reduce their output voluntarily by any significant amount so their participation in the agreement is mostly symbolic.
Sources
https://oilprice.com/oil-price-charts
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-global-oil/oil-prices-climb-on-opec-led-cuts-but-off-session-highsidUSKBN1O603M
https://af.reuters.com/article/angolaNews/idAFL8N1Y95GV
https://twitter.com/realdonaldtrump/status/1070328136150200320
https://af.reuters.com/article/angolaNews/idAFL8N1YC3T0
https://af.reuters.com/article/angolaNews/idAFL8N1YA4O5
https://af.reuters.com/article/angolaNews/idAFL8N1Y84BXE