Oil markets have remained largely stable on the back of strong demand and ongoing efforts led by OPEC and Russia to curb production and tighten the market.
Prices remained close to the mid-2015 high reached in the previous session.
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US West Texas Intermediate (WTI) crude futures CLc1 increased by 3 cents to trade at $60.40 a barrel, trading close to the high of $60.74 on June 2015 reached the previous day, according to Reuters.
Brent crude futures LCOc1 fell by 2 cents to trade at $66.55 a barrel, which was close to the $67.29 May 2015 high from the previous day.
However, certain indicators pointed that markets had overshot in the last days of 2017 and trading this year, as US production is expected to rise further and market watchers are expressing doubts over whether current demand growth can be sustained.
Denmark-based Saxo Bank commodity strategy head Ole Hansen was quoted by the news agency as saying: “Multiple but temporary supply disruptions like the North Sea Forties and Libyan pipeline outages (and) protests across Iran… helped create a record speculative long bet.”
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By GlobalDataHansen noted that factors such as resuming operations at the North Sea pipeline and the protests in Iran showing no signs of impacting its oil production, as well as increasing US output will have an impact on the prices, with potential for a downturn in early 2018.
Hansen further added: “It is only a matter of time before the ten million barrel per day production target will be reached.”
