U.S President, Donald TrumpThe crash of the benchmark US oil prices has been described as a blow to President Donald Trump, who has gone to extreme lengths to protect the US oil industry, including backing moves by OPEC and Russia to cut production.
Earlier today, April 20, report had it that the oil price had crashed to less than one dollar a barrel as the collapse in demand caused by the coronavirus pandemic leaves the world awash with oil and not enough storage capacity. Experts are saying that producers may soon be paying for buyers to take it off their hands.
West Texas Intermediate, the US marker, lost 99 per cent today, with the price of oil for delivery next month sinking to record lows on warnings that traders were struggling to access storage capacity at the refinery hub of Cushing, Oklahoma, which is expected to be full within weeks.
CME Group, the operator of the exchange where WTI trades, took the extraordinary measure of saying prices could even turn negative for the current contract, which expires tomorrow. That means producers would be paying buyers to take their oil in order to delay the shutdown of their fields.
The price crash is the latest indication of the depth of the crisis hitting the oil sector. Lockdowns imposed in many of the world’s major economies have sent crude demand tumbling by as much as a third, leaving the industry facing what Jefferies analyst Jason Gammel called “the bleakest oil macro outlook” he had ever seen.
Physical grades in many North American regions have fallen into the low single digits reflecting a dearth of buyers able to take delivery of oil, even as prices for later contracts have held up marginally better due to some investors betting on an eventual rebound.
In Canada, spot prices for Alberta’s heavy oil, which sells at a deep discount to WTI, traded at below minus $6 a barrel in the spot market, according to traders and brokers. The possibility of negative prices for the main US oil grades is growing.
Stephen Schork, editor of oil-market newsletter The Schork Report, said he expected access to storage capacity in the US to be exhausted within two weeks — and cautioned that the collapse of the country’s oil consumption was accelerating.
“It just gets uglier from here,” Mr Schork said, adding that sharply rising unemployment numbers meant fewer and fewer Americans would be driving, hurting petrol demand even during its peak summer months.
“This summer is dead on arrival. The biggest demand months are not going to happen,” he said.
Part of the rapid decline in WTI prices reflects technicalities around the contract for oil to be delivered in May, which expires on Tuesday while short-term storage issues are severe.
Still, WTI for June delivery was also down 10 per cent at $22.62, while Brent crude, the international marker, dropped 5 per cent to $26.72. Both benchmarks traded above $65 a barrel as recently as January.
Dealers speculated that traders who had successfully leased storage were putting pressure on rivals without access to tank farms. That could allow them to snap up ultra-cheap oil for their storage tanks, before locking in much higher prices in the futures market, essentially buying oil for less than $2 and then selling a month later for more than $20.
Traders said contracts for later delivery were being propped up by hopes the worst of the demand destruction could be passed by the summer, if lockdowns and travel bans are eased. But others are questioning whether the record-breaking gaps between cash trades and contracts for later delivery are sustainable.
“The May contract expires tomorrow so volume on it is going to be very light,” said Olivier Jakob at Petromatrix. “That being said, oil is very weak . . . The big thing right now is destruction of demand due to the virus.”
Wall Street opened lower, dragged down by weakness in energy stocks. The S&P 500 was down 0.5 per cent in New York. The sub index for energy was off 4.5 per cent.
European indices steadied, with the continent-wide Stoxx 600 closing 0.7 per cent higher, while London’s FTSE 100 and Frankfurt’s Dax gained 0.45 per cent.
Crude prices have plummeted this year on the possibility that the coronavirus outbreak will cause a deep global recession. The number of Covid-19 infections worldwide topped 2.4m as of Monday, according to Johns Hopkins data, with more than 165,000 dead.
The latest developments “painted a grim picture of a world still firmly in the grip of the coronavirus crisis, amplifying worries about sinking oil demand”, said Vandana Hari, founder of Vanda Insights, a Singapore-based energy research firm.
The deepening fall in oil prices has come despite an Opec-backed deal to cut roughly 10 per cent of global crude supply. Reductions of varying magnitude are planned to run until April 2022 as part of efforts to stabilise prices.
Baker Hughes data on Friday showed that the number of active oil rigs in the US has dropped by more than a third over the past month. But signs of curtailed US supply have done little to boost prices.
“Too much oil, with nowhere to put it,” said Kit Juckes, a senior strategist at Société Générale in London, noting that “oil-sensitive currencies are under pressure again”.
Equity markets in Asia came under pressure earlier in the session. Japan’s benchmark Topix fell 0.7 per cent and Australia’s S&P/ASX 200 shed 2.5 per cent, while Hong Kong’s Hang Seng was flat.
In fixed income, the yield on the 10-year US Treasury was little changed at 0.623 per cent. Source: Financial Times.
