The price of texas intermediate oil (WTI) fell 3.6% this Thursday and closed at 105.76 dollars, after the alliance of OPEC+ producing countries announced that it maintains its plan to add 648,000 barrels of crude oil per day to its entire oil supply in August.
At the end of operations on the New York Mercantile Exchange (Nymex), WTI futures contracts for delivery in August lost 4.02 dollars compared to the previous close.
In the monthly calculation of June, the WTI has lost more than 10% of its value, but taking into account the evolution of prices in the first half of the year, it has become more expensive by 49%.
The decision of the oil cartel, led by Saudi Arabia and Russia, did not come as a surprise since OPEC + limited itself to following the script that the organization itself had set on June 2.
“The Kingdom’s (Wahhabi) production will rise to the level of 11 million barrels (daily),” Abdelaziz bin Salman announced in a short tweet confirming today’s decision.
According to analysts, no one doubts that the Saudis will comply with the new production cap, since together with the Emiratis they would be the only ones who currently have sufficient capacity to open the taps substantially and quickly.
On the other hand, doubts persist about whether the rest of the OPEC + members will also achieve it, which have seen their productive capacity reduced due to the lack of investment in the sector.
Analyst Craig Erlam, from the firm Oanda, considers that the prospect of a recession is the main factor that is preventing an “unsustainable increase” in prices due to the reopening in China and the difficulties shown by OPEC + to meet its quotas.
Black gold closed lower on Wednesday after the latest data on oil and gasoline inventories was released.
The Energy Information Administration (EIA) yesterday announced crude oil, gasoline and refined inventories two weeks late due to technical problems that prevented the release of last week’s data.
Although crude oil inventories fell by 2.8 million barrels, (1 million less than what the American Petroleum Institute had advanced yesterday), a bullish news for the price, gasoline and distillate inventories rose by 2.6 millions each.
“This suggests that high prices (of gasoline) are beginning to curb consumer spending at gas stations, which is clearly negative for demand,” analyst Tom Essaye said today in a report by Sevens Report.
For its part, the price of natural gas futures contracts for August subtracted 1.07 dollars, to 5.42 dollars, and that of gasoline futures expiring the same month fell 17 cents, to 3.64 dollars the gallon.
