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This past Friday, ahead of the scheduled OPEC meeting this week, Saudi Arabia abruptly announced a new Energy Minister, Prince Adbulaziz. The move sparked momentary concern that this was a signal the Saudi's would be reversing course on the OPEC+ production cut agreement, but it appears they are actually doubling down.
Oil & Refined products all plunged today on a series of events. Both Brent & WTI were down over 3% this morning, and by 2pm refined products were down over 11 cents.
Crude slipped past the looming $60/bbl benchmark this afternoon, as pricing surged over $2/bbl (~4%). Prices have been largely supported the past several weeks by looming Iranian-US tensions and price level support from the continuing OPEC+ production cuts.
The NYMEX was up today across the board, with Crude closing out at $63.08/bbl, comfortably above that $60 benchmark, and refined products both edged up almost 3 cents, with ULSD closing at 2.0424 (+.0290) and RBOB settling at 1.9687 (+.0288).
Prices have been trending upward this week, largely based on OPEC following through on production cuts. Namely, we saw a drop in output of around 800K bpd in January by its member nations. This would seem to indicate that the so called "OPEC+ deal" to cut output and thus global oversupply is actually being followed, and it appears it is starting to have the desired effect - stabilizing prices higher than we have seen over the past year or so.
As we head towards the end of 2018, it looks like oil prices will finish the year out down about 20%. We saw wildly fluctuating energy markets throughout the year, but the fundamental factors of supply and global economic growth concerns kept the downward pressure on pricing over the long term.
OPEC, as well as the so called "OPEC+" partners have reached a tentative agreement on production cuts, causing the oil market to spike Friday. The cuts reportedly amount to 800,000 bpd on OPEC's part, and an additional 400,000 bpd (combined) from allied nations, including Russia. No specific cuts by country were committed to, or at least they were not confirmed in statements.
Oil was down today as the market weighed out OPEC speculation on one hand, and a drop in US Crude inventories on the other.
Today saw oil prices have the biggest one day rally of 2017 thus far, with WTI Crude surging up 3.3% ($1.55) to settle out at $47.89/bbl. Likewise, refined products surged, with ULSD jumping over 5 cents (+.0516) to 1.5685, and gasoline jumped +.0394 to settle at 1.5962.
The oil markets were down sharply this morning on increasing cynicism that, essentially, global supply will not be driven down sufficiently by either OPEC or "non-cartel" producer production caps, or the summer driving season in the U.S. being upon us (despite the weather here in Boston, technically yes, its summer driving season).