Some market observers see a massive wave of LNG supply ready to flood the market, but the fears of cargo cancellations may be exaggerated, with the “great wave” more like a gradually rising tide.
Crude oil prices continued to increase this week, with WTI at Cushing closing Tuesday at $84.65/bbl, the highest level since October 13, 2014. The rise in crude since the spring of 2020 has been swift and almost relentless, interrupted only by pauses at $40, $60, and $70, when the market took breathers and seemed to say to itself, “We’re not done yet, right?” The question now is, can anything stop WTI from topping $90 and yes, the magic $100 mark — something that few would have predicted we’d see again so soon . The reality is, there are many factors driving crude prices higher but few holding prices down. In today’s RBN blog, we discuss what’s driving the rapid run-up in oil prices, whether $100/bbl WTI is a sure thing, and what happens if — when? — oil hits triple digits.
Well, here we are. The last day of 2020. We are tempted to say “unprecedented” to describe the year. But the word is so overused — there’s been an unprecedented use of the word “unprecedented” — let’s just say it will be good riddance to have this one behind us. After all, we’ve seen a collapse in transportation fuel demand, an oil price war between major producers, negative $37/bbl crude prices, massive LNG cargo cancellations — the list goes on — all in the context of a global pandemic and much of the world committed to weaning itself off fossil fuels over the next few decades. How do you make sense of all that? How do you anticipate when it’s going to be “all right” again? Well, one thing we can do is to heed the events and trends that captured the market’s attention during all this chaos. In other words, to put a spotlight on the things that the market considers top priority — crowd-sourced market intelligence, if you will. Well, at RBN we have one way to do that. We scrupulously monitor the website hit rate of the RBN blogs that are fired off to over 30,000 people each day and, at the end of each year, we look back to see which topics generated the most interest from you, our readers. That hit rate reveals a lot about major market trends. So, once again, we look into the rear-view mirror to check out the Top 10 blogs of the year based on the number of rbnenergy.com website hits.
