Six months into the year and the oil market appears to be balancing out. Oil prices have traded within a couple of dollars of $50/B for more than a month. But the IEA warns that this seeming rebalance could be an illusion, to be thrown out of whack once outages in Canada, Venezuela, Nigeria and Libya come back online. Indeed, since peaking at $52.51/B on 8 June, Brent prices were trading some $4/B below this as MEES went to press.
Although the IEA now sees the market balancing in the second half of 2016, it doesn’t expect this to prove sustainable, with global stocks set to rise again in the first half of 2017. Its latest monthly Oil Market Report, released 14 June, the IEA raises its 2016 global demand growth estimate from 1.22mn b/d to 1.33mn b/d largely due to a 172,000 b/d upward revision to demand in the first half of the year. (CONTINUED - 692 WORDS)
