Cold Rescue For Crude

摘要

Crude oil prices saw an outbreak of relative stability in January, trading between $40-$50/barrel, buffeted by Israel's military incursions into Gaza, by the Ukraine-Russia gas crisis and by bouts of cold weather, which helped drive US front-month futures prices towards $50/b end-January. Any instability in the Middle East tends to support crude prices, but in a market with a clear overhang of physical crude the limited potential for spillover to areas of actual oil output had little impact.rnThe Ukraine-Russia gas crisis helped push crude prices up in early January, and will have created some additional demand to replace lost gas. However, the price of the physical crude benchmark Dated Brent actually settled lower following the full cut-off of gas exports to Europe through Ukraine from January 7. Dated Brent fell from $48.635/d on January 6 to $40.74/b on January 12 and failed to rise above $45/b until January 26, when it settled at $47.10/b, mainly on short-term cold weather demand.