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**Hugh** · Today, 10:00

Quote:

Originally Posted by papa smurf

A big thank donny you from the rest of the world for opening your orange gob and spooking the markets yet again and driving up prices oorah usa usa

https://oilprice.com/Energy/Oil-Pric...Collapses.html

Quote:

A month ago, any analyst suggesting international oil prices could soar all the way to $200 per barrel would have been laughed out of the studio. Now, some are beginning to acknowledge that this is a real possibility, and with good reason.

Oil and fuel exports from the Middle East stood at 25.13 million barrels daily in February, Reuters reported this month, citing data from Kpler. By mid-March, this had plummeted by close to two-thirds, to 9.71 million barrels a day. Vortexa has even more worrying figures, putting the February daily average at 26.1 million barrels of crude and fuels, and the mid—March average at just 7.5 million barrels daily.

Yet even worse than daily shipments is the situation in production. Everyone in the Middle East is cutting oil production—and those wells take a while to restart. The reason they are cutting is that storage capacity is limited—and some of those “export” barrels are actually going on tankers for storage rather than shipment to clients. A fifth of global oil, in other words, is severely disrupted, and even if the bombs stop flying tomorrow, it will take a while for things to get back to normal.

Iraq has reportedly curbed oil production by some 2.9 million barrels daily, ING commodity strategists said in a note earlier today. In Saudi Arabia, the cuts are to the tune of between 2 million barrels daily and 2.5 million barrels daily. The UAE has reduced production by 1.5 million bpd, and Kuwait has slashed output by a reported 1.3 million barrels daily. That makes a total of over 7 million barrels daily gone.

For context, the International Energy Agency had predicted the oil market would this year be in a surplus of around 3.7 million barrels daily. Not only is that now gone—if it was ever here at all—but there is more supply frozen because of the crisis. Indeed, the IEA itself estimates shut-in production at 10 million barrels daily.

What all this means is that there is no physical oil to respond to demand. And when physical supply is tight, prices fly high and take a while to go back down if the situation normalizes, even accounting for the destruction in demand that high oil prices would inevitably cause.

“We’re very much in the $150 range but I don’t think it’s ridiculous at all to [suggest] $200. It would be very fair given we are basically having a crisis-a-day right now equivalent to supply outages,” Onyx Capital Group CEO Greg Newman told CNBC this week, noting that the Middle Eastern oil benchmark had already hit $150 per barrel amid the supply squeeze.