IEA/Birol: Supply contraction will push oil prices up

The President of the International Energy Agency (IEA), Fatih Birol, stated that OPEC+’s decision to cut production will push prices up. The President of the International Energy Agency (IEA), Fatih Birol, stated that OPEC+’s decision to cut production was a bad surprise for economies and that they predicted that prices would increase as supply tightened in the second half of the year. Birol added that global fossil fuel consumption could peak before entering the last quarter of the 2020s. On the other hand, the US’s commercial crude oil inventories increased by approximately 600 thousand barrels last week compared to the previous week. The US Energy Information Administration (EIA) announced that the country’s commercial crude oil inventories increased by approximately 600 thousand barrels last week, reaching 470 million 500 thousand barrels. The market expectation was that inventories would decrease by 1 million 300 thousand barrels. Strategic crude oil stocks, which are not included in commercial crude oil stocks, also decreased by 1.6 million barrels to 369.6 million barrels. During the same period, US gasoline stocks decreased by 300 thousand barrels to 222.2 million barrels.