(London) Oil prices rose slightly on Monday, driven both by speculative positioning by investors who bet on a drop in crude stocks during the summer and by geopolitical risk, particularly in the Middle East.
Around 5:30 a.m. (Eastern time) (11:30 a.m. in Paris), the price of a barrel of Brent from the North Sea, for delivery in August, rose 0.47% to $85.64.
Its American equivalent, a barrel of West Texas Intermediate (WTI), for delivery the same month, gained 0.46% to $81.10.
DNB analysts note “the strong recovery in speculative positions” on oil since last week.
Brent is currently in a situation of “backwardation”, that is to say that the price for short delivery is higher than that requested for more distant maturities.
This usually implies that investors fear a tightening of supply in the coming months and want to protect themselves by replenishing their stocks, which therefore pushes up prices for the shorter-term contract.
Tamas Varga, analyst at PVM Energy also mentions “the growing confidence” among investors “in the fact that global oil stocks will inevitably fall during the summer in the Northern Hemisphere”.
At the same time, investors remain attentive to geopolitical risk in the Middle East.
“No supply disruptions are currently expected in the Middle East, but bellicose rhetoric is a big part of supporting oil,” says Varga.
Israel’s northern front, along with Lebanon, has been the scene of escalating fire between the Israeli army and Hezbollah, a Hamas ally, raising fears of a larger-scale war.
On Sunday, the Shiite movement supported by Iran announced that it had targeted two Israeli military sites using explosive drones, seriously injuring a soldier, in response to the death of a leader of an allied Islamist group, in an Israeli strike in eastern Lebanon.
Geopolitical risk also remains present in Europe. Kyiv claimed responsibility for a drone attack on several refineries in Russia on Friday. Ukraine, faced with a Russian offensive for more than two years, regularly responds by attacking Russian regions and particularly targeting energy sites.