Oil falls amid renewed worry about demand

Tokyo — Oil fell 3% on Monday, extending last week’s losses as growing cases of Covid-19 in the US and Europe raised concern about crude demand, while the prospect of increased supply also hurt sentiment.

Brent crude was down $1.25 cents, or 3%, at $40.52 by 7.55am GMT. US West Texas Intermediate (WTI) dropped $1.28, or 3.2%, to $38.57, having fallen more than a dollar shortly after the start of trading.

Brent fell 2.7% last week and WTI dropped 2.5%.

The US reported its highest number yet of new coronavirus infections in two days through Saturday, while in France new cases hit a record of more than 50,000 on Sunday, underlining the severity of the outbreak.

On the supply side, Libya’s National Oil Corp on Friday ended its force majeure on exports from two key ports and said production would reach 1-million barrels a day in four weeks, a quicker ramp-up than many analysts had predicted.

“New barrels of Libyan oil come at a time when the crude oil market had just faced the disappointment from the recently concluded Opec+ ministerial panel when the organisation made no new policy proposals,” said Avtar Sandu, senior manager commodities at Phillip Futures in Singapore.

Opec+, a grouping of producers including Opec and Russia, is also set to increase output by 2-million barrels a day in January 2021 after cutting production by a record amount earlier in 2020.

Russian President Vladimir Putin indicated last week he may agree to extending Opec+ oil production reductions.

In the US, energy companies increased their rig count by five to take the total to 287 in the week to October 23, the most since May, energy services firm Baker Hughes said. The rig count is an indicator of future supply.

Still, investors increased their net long positions in US crude futures and options during the week through October 20, the US Commodity Futures Trading Commision said on Friday.

Reuters