During trading on Friday, oil prices moved up after an initial decline.
The cost of April futures for Brent oil on the London ICE Futures exchange by 18:06 Moscow time was $ 61.59 per barrel, which is $ 0.45 (0.74%) higher than the price at the close of the previous session.
The price of futures for WTI crude oil for March at the New York Mercantile Exchange (NYMEX) by that time amounted to $ 58.57 per barrel, which is $ 0.33 (0.57%) higher than the level at the close of previous trading.
The drop in quotations on the eve interrupted the longest periods of continuous growth since January 2019 for both grades of oil, according to Dow Jones data. Both Brent and WTI closed on Wednesday at their highs since January 2020.
Meanwhile, Brent crude oil may still rise in price by more than 2% over the week, Trading Economics notes. Some analysts are also optimistic about the long-term outlook for oil prices.
Commodity traders such as Trafigura Group expect prices to rise, and Citigroup Inc. predicts Brent could hit $ 70 a barrel by the end of the year.
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The market was pressured by concerns about the outlook for global oil demand due to the deterioration of forecasts by the International Energy Agency (IEA) and OPEC.
OPEC revised its estimate of global oil demand in 2019, increasing it from 99.76 to 99.98 million bpd, while in 2020, according to preliminary estimates of the organization, demand amounted to 90.26 million bpd, the report says. cartel published on Thursday.
Thus, the growth rate in 2020 changed from 9.75 million b / d to 9.72 million b / d, and world consumption turned out to be 30 thousand b / d less than previous estimates.
In 2021, OPEC expects an increase in oil consumption by 5.8 million b / d, which is 100 thousand b / d less than the forecast of the previous month – up to 96.05 million b / d.
Meanwhile, the IEA has cut its forecast for global oil demand in 2021 by 100,000 bpd to 5.4 million bpd.
Global demand this year will reach 96.4 million bpd, recovering about 60% of the volume lost to the pandemic in 2020, the agency writes in its report.
While oil demand is expected to fall by 1 million bpd in the first quarter of 2021 compared to the fourth quarter of 2020, the favorable economic outlook is underpinning stronger demand in the second half of the year, the IEA said.
