Near-dated crude futures are nearly 1% higher this morning, having fallen almost $3/bbl yesterday amid early-year demand-side uncertainty. Chinese crude oil production grew by 1.6% last year to 4.16M bbd, close to the 2015 record high 4.3M bbd but a smaller rate of growth y/y (2% the year before); Reuters predicts that the rate of growth will continue to slow in 2024 as the ‘easy to access’ wells in China become more difficult (and expensive) from which to extract crude.
Some of this morning’s bullishness comes from the continued closure of Libya’s Shahara oil field (to the tune of 0.3M bbd), which is adding price pressure to a Mediterranean basin already wobbled by a geopolitically tense Middle East. To that end, ship tracking data suggest that oil cargoes continue to flow through the Red Sea, despite a series of recent attacks; the vast majority of incidents have targeted Israeli-linked container vessels and (evidentially) not oil tankers; Israeli-linked vessels (not necessarily carrying cargoes to Israel) have been attacked in the Arabian Gulf, but they are not passing through the Bab-Eel-Mandeb.
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