At the start of a week in which three major agencies released their near-term oil market outlooks, the CEO of the world’s largest oil company provided his own assessment. “With regard to the oil demand, we expect the global oil market to remain healthy over the remainder of this year,” Saudi Aramco CEO Amin Nasser told reporters on 10 March, “we’re looking at a growth of about 1.5 million barrels [per day]… and so I consider supply/demand to be in reasonable balance during the remainder of the year.”
Mr Nasser’s figure puts Aramco’s demand growth expectations far below Opec’s bullish 2.25mn b/d forecast, which it has kept unchanged since July. Instead, Aramco’s outlook is closer to that of the US EIA, which nudged up its projection slightly to 1.43mn b/d this week. Moving closer to alignment with this position is the IEA, which in its latest Oil Market Report (OMR) revised up its global demand growth estimate by 110,000 b/d to 1.33mn b/d. (CONTINUED - 827 WORDS)
