The international energy market has been showing some growth over the last few days. In particular, the overall price of the OPEC basket advanced 2,5% up, Market Leader reports. The price moved by $1,13/b all the way up to $44,95/b. The corresponding figures were published on OPEC’s official website.
As you probably know, the notion of “OPEC basket” was introduced on January 1st, 1987. This basket is a conventional mix of oils delivered by 12 OPEC members. At this point, the all-time high is located at $140,73. The all-time high was set on July 3rd, 2008. For the rest of the world, the OPEC basket is one of the key indicators of the situation in the global market of crude oil.
Yesterday, oil prices started regaining some of the lost value amid new oil forecasts saying that the global demand for crude oil is going to grow to some extent in the near future. On Wednesday, the price of Brent oil exceeded $53/b, which hasn’t been seen for a long time up until now.
Masterforex-V Academy reports that crude oil managed to get and consolidate above the $50/b line for the first since August. Meanwhile, OPEC expects higher oil prices.
The Secretary General of OPEC gave the cartel’s joint oil forecast during the recent Oil&Money conference in London. According to the forecast, crude oil may soon start recovering from the long-term plunge. One of the reasons for that is the expectation of lower investment activities by oil companies. In particular, they say the investments may well shrink by 22,4%. The investment slowdown leads to oil production cuts, which is going to reverse the imbalance and back higher oil prices.
At the same time, the Secretary General is sure that oil companies will have to invest some $10 000 billion by the year of 2040 in order to back the stability of the oil industry. With that said, he seriously doubts that the companies will be able to allocate such a huge amount of money. The Secretary is also convinced that low oil prices will also back higher consumption. In particular, OPEC’s predictions say that the global consumption of crude oil is going to boost by 1,3 million barrels a day. This is good news for OPEC.
