(New York) Oil prices ended lower on Thursday, undermined by the prospect of a resumption of Iraqi Kurdish oil exports to Turkey, as well as a worrying macroeconomic picture.
The price of a barrel of Brent North Sea oil for July delivery fell 1.87% to close at $74.98.
Its American equivalent, the barrel of West Texas Intermediate (WTI), with maturity in June, lost 2.32% to 70.87 dollars.
The black gold had however started the session in the green, the WTI taking up 1.29%, before a reversal near the close.
“The biggest news is Iraq,” responded John Kilduff of Again Capital.
The federal government in Baghdad has formally asked Turkey to resume Kurdish oil exports, after finalizing an agreement with the autonomous Kurdistan region of Iraq.
Baghdad and Erbil “are now waiting for the Turkish response to resume exports”, according to the Kurdish administration.
The transport of crude via the pipeline that connects Kirkuk, Iraq, to the Turkish port of Ceyhan, has been interrupted since the end of March, after a court decision which led to a political crisis, finally resolved by an agreement between Baghdad and Erbil.
“That clearly represents a significant amount of oil,” said John Kilduff, or about 450,000 barrels per day.
In addition to the Iraqi file, “soft macroeconomic data in China and the increase in job cuts in the United States are responsible” for the decline in prices, according to José Torres, of Interactive Brokers.
Inflation came out at 0.1% over one month in April in China, less than the 0.3% expected by economists. As for producer prices, they fell 3.6% year on year in April, reflecting “a gap between supply and demand” for goods, according to Duncan Wrigley of Pantheon Macroeconomics.
“The thesis that justified higher oil prices was based, in part, on a strong rebound in the Chinese economy, which has not been confirmed” so far, observes John Kilduff.
As for the United States, the number of new weekly jobless claims there reached its highest level since October 2021 last week, according to figures published on Thursday.
“Employment is very much linked to the demand for gasoline,” emphasizes John Kilduff. “So if the unemployment numbers really start to climb, that’s going to be a problem. »
For Edward Moya, of Oanda, operators have ignored the latest estimates from the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), which maintains that average demand will reach 101.9 million barrels per day this year.