Oil erases weekly drop on Forties pipeline outage, IEA outlook
- by Emilio Sims
- in Money
- — Dec 16, 2017
"Recently, US drilling activity and well completion rates have picked up again, suggesting higher production to come in a few months", causing IEA to raise its annual growth forecast for total US crude oil to 390,000 barrels a day this year and 870,000 barrels a day for 2018.
OPEC also revised its estimate for U.S. oil output growth for 2018 to 1.05 million bpd, while the U.S. Energy Information Administration increased its growth forecast to 780,000 bpd. "The baseline for oil demand has been raised by roughly 0.2 mb/d.", the Paris based agency said.
The International Energy Agency said Thursday that OPEC and its allies had managed to reduce global stockpiles to the lowest level in two years, yet supply growth would outpace global demand in 2018.
With cash pouring into the USA shale oil industry, the United States is on track to deliver up to 80 percent of the world's oil production gains through 2025, the IEA estimates.
It indicated that non-OPEC supply is set to rise by 0.6 mb/d in 2017 and 1.6 mb/d next year, just as it stated that OPEC crude supply fell in November for the fourth consecutive month to 32.36 mb/d, down 1.3 mb/d on a year ago. Gasoline stocks surprised the market, making a gain of 5.7 million barrels to 226.5 million barrels, according to the EIA.
In the Wednesday report, the EIA said crude stocks fell 5.1 million barrels in the week ended December 8.
The Forties pipeline system, which was built by BP in 1975 as one of the largest in the North Sea, is about 100 miles long and transports around 450,000 barrels of oil a day, which is about 40 per cent of United Kingdom production. All the results of the outage are seen as helping OPEC in its mission to reduce global inventories.
Yet after lows of $56.09 earlier in the day for US crude and $62.01 for Brent crude, both grades had rallied again by settlement. Global margins declined in November, losing nearly $1/bbl.
It said despite reducing the pressure, the crack has extended and as a outcome, the Incident Management Team decided on a controlled shutdown of the pipeline.
One trading source said late on Tuesday that a tanker at Hound Point had not been able to take on all of its scheduled load of crude oil because the system was "running dry". "Will this carry over into the New Year?"
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