Markets

The prices for front-month NYMEX WTI and ICE Brent futures have now risen for nine and seven weeks in a row, respectively. On the other hand, DME Oman, NYMEX RBOB and ULSD, as well as ICE gasoil broke their five-week streaks of price increases as of Oct. 22.

The steady march through autumn toward winter seems to have energy traders on edge, as there are few signs of supply increases large enough to dent prices.

While parts of the world are still suffering through renewed COVID-19 outbreaks, demand for various forms of energy has returned to pre-pandemic levels even though supplies of some products have lagged, causing their prices to surge.

Even though week-on-week crude and product stockbuilds were seen in the most-recent data for several major categories in some regions, most stockpiles have been firmly entrenched in year-on-year deficits for quite some time.

With cooler weather around the corner and NG prices soaring, many market watchers are expecting demand for petroleum in the heating and power-generation sectors to be robust in the upcoming winter even as oil stocks continue to tighten.

By the end of the week to Sept. 17, much of the offshore production that had been shut in due to Hurricane Ida was restored, but Tropical Storm Nicholas was disrupting the recovery efforts and threatening more production outages early in the week.

After late-Aug.'s Hurricane Ida tore through the GoM and parts of the US, offshore producers were slow to restore upstream capacity, supporting small week-on-week price increases for US WTI and European Brent crude futures, though DME Oman crude lost some ground.

Price support came from ongoing upstream and downstream outages after Hurricane Ida caused destruction along the US Gulf Coast.

Concerns about hiccups in the demand recovery took a backseat to supply disruptions during the week ending Aug. 27 after a fire at an offshore production platform on Aug. 22 took out production in the western Gulf of Mexico's Bay of Campeche.

Rising coronavirus-infection rates and data indicating that economic improvements are beginning to slow down in parts of the world led to a reignition of concerns about the fragile demand recovery.