t’s a crazy market. Last week we were looking forward to a week of normality. Then President Obasanjo of Nigeria called a meeting. That was all it took and we were off once again. The 600,000 barrel per day shut-in from the Nigerian Delta is not helping the tight supply lines we are so used to. But as you have seen, the world has not collapsed as a result…
So with just a wave of his highlighter pen Obasanjo made a worried market jump back up to $66 – on the back of some rather strange data…
So refiners are sucking up crude. Total inventories have fallen by 13.5 million barrels over the last three weeks. The Energy Information Agency (EIA) report that OPEC have failed to meet their target runs, on the back of those Nigerian, Iraqi, Iranian and Venezuelan problems, bombs and poor maintenance (the last two) respectively. OPEC 10 could only hit 27.855 million barrels per day, down 200,000 bpd year on year.