Supply side tailwinds support Brent's price

Front-month ICE Brent has inched upwards by $0.31/bbl on the day, to $78.97/bbl at 09.00 GMT.

PHOTO: Getty Images

Upward pressure:

Iraq has halted nearly 450,000 b/d of crude oil shipments to Turkey from its Kurdistan-operated northern oil fields after winning an arbitration case against Turkey in the International Court of Arbitration, according to Reuters. Turkey has also agreed to stop pumping crude in Kurdistan.

“There’s no timeline for an agreement to be reached to restart flows and the tighter the oil market becomes, the greater the loss it will be. For now, it’s contributed to a small rise in the price, with Brent now trading around the lows of the months that preceded the min-banking crisis,” says OANDA’s senior market analyst Craig Erlam.

US crude inventories fell by 6.1 million bbls in the week ending 24 March, according to an American Petroleum Institute (API) estimate. The API’s stock decline projection has countered a Reuters analyst poll estimate of a 200,000-bbl build.

Downward pressure:

Banking turmoil in the US has pushed the US economy towards recession, Neel Kashkari, President of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis has said in an interview with CBS News.

Meanwhile, ongoing French refinery strikes have dented demand for Nigerian crude exports, since France is one of its largest export destinations.

By Konica Bhatt

Please get in touch with comments or additional info to news@engine.online