(London) Oil prices were up on Tuesday, the day after a sharp drop, with the market moving erratically with the evidence on the impact of the new variant of COVID-19 on demand, while gas European broke a new record.
At around 6:05 am, the price of a barrel of North Sea Brent for February delivery advanced 1.08% to $ 72.29.
In New York, a US barrel of West Texas Intermediate (WTI) for the same month, which is the first day of use as a benchmark contract, gained 1.33% to 69.52 dollars.
The day before, Brent lost 3.71% and WTI 2.72%.
Benchmark crude prices “increase slightly on Tuesday,” notes Avtar Sandu, analyst at Phillip Futures, “but investors remain concerned about the rapid spread of the Omicron variant of COVID-19 around the world, which could potentially reduce demand for fuel “.
This new strain detected at the end of November in South Africa is now largely in the majority in the United States, according to data from the American health authorities released Monday evening: it represented 73.2% of new COVID-19 infections in the country, against 12 , 6% the previous week.
It is indeed “the fear of Omicron which governs the markets”, estimates Tamas Varga, of PVM, and the reassuring news or not which follow one another lead them “to wander like a headless chicken”, judge Jeffrey Halley, of Oanda.
Investors were also watching gas prices, which on Tuesday approached their previous all-time highs reached on October 6.
The European benchmark price, the Dutch TTF, touched around 5:20 a.m. EST 162,775 euros per megawatt hour (MWh), up just over 10% from the close the day before, breaking its previous record of October 6.
Two factors explain this current overheating: “temperatures which continue to drop in Europe” as well as “the absence of reservation by Gazprom (the Russian gas giant, editor’s note) of additional capacity in January for gas passing through Ukraine”, Deutsche Bank analysts say.
Ukraine is also at the heart of geopolitical tensions between Moscow and the West, the latter claiming that Russia is massing soldiers on the Ukrainian border with a view to a possible military operation, an accusation rejected by the Kremlin.