(New York) Oil prices started the week higher on Monday following new drone strikes on Russian refineries over the weekend, and comments from Iraq on a reduction in its crude exports.
The price of a barrel of Brent from the North Sea, for delivery in May, gained 1.81% to $86.89.
Its American equivalent, a barrel of West Texas Intermediate (WTI), for delivery in April, closed above the $80 mark for the first time since November. It ended with a jump of 2.07% to $82.72.
A new drone attack, blamed on Ukraine, caused the fire at the Slavyansk-on-Kuban refinery in southern Russia, in the Krasnodar region, regional authorities said on Sunday.
The Russian army also claimed to have shot down 35 Ukrainian drones overnight over different regions of Russia, including Moscow, a particularly high figure.
On Saturday, a refinery was set on fire in Samara, some 1,000 km from the Ukrainian border, after drone attacks.
This news from Russia “is bullish for both crude and refined products,” said Matt Smith of Kpler, emphasizing that Russia does not have adequate storage capacity to redirect the volume of crude that had to be processed by infrastructure. damaged.
Last week, crude oil had already climbed due to geopolitical risk in Russia, after an oil refinery was targeted by a drone on Wednesday in Ryazan. On Tuesday another refinery was targeted in the Nizhni Novgorod region, 800 km from the border with Ukraine.
“Ukrainian drone attacks on Russian oil infrastructure have surprised the market, as many of them are located inside Russia itself,” explains Bjarne Schieldrop, analyst at Seb.
While crude oil supplies are not expected to be disrupted for the moment, “oil refining capacity could be lost due to these attacks”, he continues.
Furthermore, prices also reacted upwards to recent remarks by the Iraqi oil minister who indicated that his country would reduce its crude exports in the coming months to compensate for production which, in January and February, exceeded the objectives agreed within OPEC+.