(New York) Oil prices fell on Friday, weighed down by data from the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) suggesting slower than expected growth in demand for black gold in 2021 and by rumors of withdrawals potential in US strategic reserves.
The price of a barrel of Brent from the North Sea for delivery in January fell 0.92% to 82.17 dollars in London from Thursday’s close.
In New York, a barrel of West Texas Intermediate (WTI) for the month of December lost 0.98% to 80.79 dollars.
Despite summits used on Wednesday morning, the two benchmark contracts on either side of the Atlantic are down slightly over the week.
The operators had in mind a possible American intervention to respond to the insufficient supply of crude.
The potential release of part of the country’s strategic oil reserves (SPR), one of the options considered, “puts a heavy ceiling on WTI,” said Han Tan of Exinity.
“It would be a spectacular effort to send a signal to the global energy market that an increase in supply is taken seriously to lower prices,” said John Kilduff of Again Capital. In order to achieve its goal, he said, this initiative to pour reserves into the market had to be taken “in coordination” with other countries in order to influence prices effectively.
“The market in any case has been highly responsive to these rumors of draining the reserves, perhaps more than I expected,” Kilduff said.
For its part, OPEC lowered its estimate of the growth in world oil demand for this year again on Thursday, under the effect of the deceleration of the recovery in China and India in the third quarter.
In its November monthly report, the cartel estimates that global oil demand will jump by 5.7 million barrels per day (mbd) over the whole of 2021, despite forecasting slightly higher annual growth. the preceding month.
If it tends to limit somewhat the recent rise in crude prices, the report “has only made marginal changes to the estimates of supply and demand for this year and next year”, qualify the experts of ING.