Oil Extends Decline From 5 1/2-Year Low as Glut Persists
Oil fell for a third day, extending its drop from the lowest close since 2009, as record supplies from Iraq and Russia bolstered speculation that a global glut that drove crude into a bear market will persist.
Futures slid as much as 2.2% in London after losing 5.1% last week. Iraq, the second-largest producer in the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, plans to boost crude exports to a record this month, the Oil Ministry said. Russia’s output rose to a post-Soviet high in December, according to preliminary Energy Ministry data. Saudi Arabia will probably offer narrower discounts for crude to Asia for February, according to a Bloomberg survey.
Brent slumped 48% last year, the most since the 2008 financial crisis, as OPEC resisted calls to cut output amid a battle with U.S. shale producers for market share. The 12-member group, which supplies about 40% of the world’s crude, pumped above its target for a seventh straight month in December, according to a Bloomberg News survey.
“Rising supply, slowing refinery demand, rising dollar, it is the same factors driving prices,” Ole Hansen, head of commodity strategy at Copenhagen-based Saxo Bank A/S, said by e-mail. “With news from Iraq and Russia about increased supply, then the expectations about the glut just continue to grow.”
WTI for February delivery dropped as much as $1.29, or 2.4%, to $51.40 a barrel in electronic trading on the New York Mercantile Exchange. It slid 58 cents to $52.69 on Jan. 2, the lowest close since April 2009. The volume of all futures traded was about 36% more than the 100-day average for the time of day. (UPDATE, 1:24 p.m. ET: -- West Texas Intermediate oil dropped below $50 a barrel for the first time since April 2009.)
Iraq plans to expand crude exports to 3.3 million barrels a day this month, Asim Jihad, a spokesman at the Oil Ministry in Baghdad, said by phone yesterday. The country exported 2.94 million a day in December, the most since the 1980s, he said.
Iraq reached an agreement with its semi-autonomous Kurdish region last month over oil exports through Turkey, after years of disagreement on the territory’s right to independently develop its energy resources. The pact allows as much as 550,000 barrels a day from northern Iraq to be shipped to the Mediterranean port of Ceyhan, along a pipeline to the Turkish border operated by the Kurdistan Regional Government.
Russian oil production rose 0.3% in December to a post-Soviet record of 10.667 million barrels a day, according to preliminary data published Jan. 2 by CDU-TEK, part of the Energy Ministry.
Saudi Arabia may narrow discounts in its official February crude selling prices to buyers in Asia in the coming days amid speculation that demand will rise following an almost 50% plunge in benchmark prices, according to 12 of 15 traders and refiners in a Bloomberg News survey through Jan. 5. Three respondents forecast price differentials to be unchanged.
The world’s biggest oil exporter offered its Arab Light grade at the biggest discount in at least 14 years for January. The move was followed by Iraq, Kuwait and Iran, prompting speculation that Middle East producers were protecting market share amid increased shipments from Latin America, North Africa and Russia.
Brent will trade at $80 a barrel this year, down from an earlier estimate of $104, amid increases in global spare capacity and rising inventories, Sanford C. Bernstein said in an e-mailed report Jan. 5. The researcher also reduced its prediction for 2016 to $90 from $109 previously.
Venezuela President Nicolas Maduro is traveling to China for talks on financing and energy and plans to visit other OPEC member nations to develop an oil-pricing strategy, he said on state television yesterday.
Maduro plans to meet Chinese President Xi Jinping as he seeks to “confront” the decline in Venezuela’s income that has forced his government to review “all investment plans” and seek new ways to obtain foreign currency.
