Oil enjoys support from Opec cuts and US sanctions

Singapore — Oil edged up on Thursday amid the Opec-led supply cuts and US sanctions against exporters Venezuela and Iran, although record US crude output and rising commercial fuel inventories prevented prices from rising further.

US West Texas Intermediate (WTI) crude oil futures were at $56.45 a barrel at 2.34am GMT, up 23c, or 0.4%, from their last settlement.

Brent crude futures were at $66.36 a barrel, up 37c, or 0.6%.

Prices are being supported by efforts led by oil cartel Opec and other countries — a grouping known as OPEC-plus — to withhold about 1.2-million barrels a day, a strategy designed to tighten markets.

“In our view, Opec’s strategy is to rebalance the market as quickly as possible and exit the cuts by the end of June in order to grow production alongside shale producers in the second half of this year,” US investment bank Goldman Sachs said in a note on Wednesday.

US sanctions against the oil industries of Opec members Iran and Venezuela have also had an impact, traders said.

Venezuela’s state-run oil firm PDVSA this week declared a maritime emergency, citing trouble accessing tankers and personnel to export its oil amid the sanctions.

Surging US supply

Despite these factors, oil remains in plentiful supply thanks to surging US production.

US crude oil stockpiles rose much more than expected last week, with inventories up by 7.1-million barrels to 452.93-million barrels, according to a weekly report by the US Energy Information Administration (EIA) on Wednesday.

Meanwhile, US crude oil production remained at a record 12.1-million barrels a day, an increase of more than 2-million barrels a day since early 2018.

That, along with the easing of a transportation bottleneck for low-cost US Permian Basin shale oil, could produce sequentially higher production, Goldman Sachs said.

“The balance between rising US production and the Opec-plus efforts to stabilise prices with a production cut was broken by higher than expected US inventories and the OECD [Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development] of warning of lower global growth impacting energy demand going forward,” said Alfonso Esparza, senior analyst at futures brokerage Oanda.

The OECD said on Wednesday the world economy would grow 3.3% in 2019, down 0.2 percentage points from the organisation’s last set of forecasts in November.

Reuters