Dhe oil price has climbed to new heights: on Thursday, the North Sea variety Brent cost $120 a barrel (159 liters) at times. That was the highest level in almost ten years. The historic all-time high of 147.50 dollars from 2008, when the world still believed that China’s hunger for raw materials was growing endlessly, has not yet been reached again. Despite this, the rise in prices has exceeded almost all forecasts by experts – hardly anyone could have imagined that last year.
On the oil market, they are now reporting on the Russian oil trader Trafigura, who has repeatedly failed to find buyers for his oil this week, although he wanted to lower the price. “Even without direct sanctions, more and more market participants are reluctant to buy Russian oil,” reports Carsten Fritsch, oil specialist at Commerzbank.
In addition, the OPEC plus merger has declared that it will not produce more oil than planned, despite the high price. This became known after an online meeting of the oil states. Accordingly, the countries do not want to increase their production volume in April by more than the 400,000 barrels per day that have been fixed for a long time. In this group, the classic OPEC countries around Saudi Arabia work together with Russia. Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman al-Saud has declared that he wants to maintain the partnership with Russia despite the war of aggression against Ukraine.
Russian oil is still flowing through the pipelines
Some of the oil countries probably don’t want to produce more oil because the high price is quite fine with them. In some cases, however, they probably won’t be able to do it overnight, as Giovanni Staunovo, oil specialist at Bank UBS, says. Energy intelligence service estimates that Russian oil exports fell by at least a third this week, or about 2.5 million barrels a day. The approximately 1.8 million barrels per day that are transported via the most important pipelines have not been affected so far. One million barrels went to Europe and 800,000 to China. For the rest – crude oil, which is mainly shipped via ports in the Baltic Sea, the Black Sea and the port of Kozmino in Russia’s Far East – it is currently difficult to find buyers.
In return, oil reserves in various industrialized countries are released. But that doesn’t seem to be turning the market around. “Strategic reserves are good for bridging temporary production interruptions, but not longer ones,” says analyst Staunovo. The oil experts at Goldman Sachs around Jeff Currie also believe that only a drop in demand due to higher prices could bring the oil market into balance now.
You can feel the consequences at the petrol stations. On the commodity markets, the price of so-called gas oil, a precursor for diesel production, rose particularly sharply compared to the previous day. The background is apparently that the sanctions are also expected to have an impact on Russian refineries.
In Germany, petrol and diesel prices reached new highs. For the first time, diesel costs an average of EUR 1.80 per liter, and Super E10 more than EUR 1.85. The fact that Super E10 sometimes costs more than 2 euros at some gas stations during the day has long since ceased to be unusual. At some motorway service stations, all types of fuel cost more than 2 euros, including diesel. In Constance, the average price for Super E10 is now more than 2 euros. This has never happened before.