Oil prices rose on Monday, pushing Brent back above $50 a barrel, buoyed by hopes that a rollout of coronavirus vaccines will lift global fuel demand while a tanker explosion in Saudi Arabia jangled nerves in the market.<\/p>\n
Brent crude futures for February rose 38 cents, or 0.8%, to $50.35 a barrel by 0454 GMT, while U.S. West Texas Intermediate crude futures for January were up 32 cents, or 0.7%, at $46.89 a barrel.<\/p>\n
Prices also extended gains amid supply jitters after a shipping firm said its oil tanker exploded after being hit by an external source while discharging at Jeddah port in Saudi Arabia.<\/p>\n
Brent and WTI have rallied for six consecutive weeks, their longest stretch of gains since June.<\/p>\n
The United States kicked off its vaccination campaign against COVID-19, buoying hopes that pandemic restrictions could end soon and lift demand at the world’s largest oil consumer.<\/p>\n
An extension of Brexit talks among European powers also buoyed financial markets on Monday.<\/p>\n
CMC Markets’ chief markets strategist Michael McCarthy asked: “Having ‘bought the rumour’ of an effective vaccine, now that delivery is here will investors ‘sell the fact’?”<\/p>\n
Major European countries continued in lockdown mode to curb the spread of COVID-19 which has reduced fuel demand. For example, Germany, the fourth largest economy in the world, plans to impose stricter lockdown from Wednesday to battle the virus.<\/p>\n
Investors are looking ahead to two meetings between the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries and its allies including Russia, a grouping known as OPEC+.<\/p>\n
The OPEC+ joint ministerial monitoring committee (JMMC) that monitors compliance among members will meet on Dec. 16, while OPEC+ will meet on Jan. 4 to study the market after their last decision to limit production rises to 500,000 barrels per day starting next year.<\/p>\n
In the United States, energy firms last week added the most oil and natural gas rigs in a week since January as producers continued to return to the wellpad.<\/p>\n
Two separate fires occurred at Nigeria’s Qua Iboe crude oil export terminal and at an oil pipeline in Iran on Sunday but the incidents have mostly been contained.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Oil prices rose on Monday, pushing Brent back above $50 a barrel, buoyed by hopes that a rollout of coronavirus vaccines will lift global fuel demand while a tanker explosion in Saudi Arabia jangled nerves in the market. Brent crude futures for February rose 38 cents, or 0.8%, to $50.35 a barrel by 0454 GMT, while U.S. West Texas Intermediate crude futures for January were up 32 cents, or 0.7%, at $46.89 a barrel. Prices also extended gains amid supply jitters after a shipping firm said its oil tanker exploded after being hit by an external source while discharging at […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":39,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[133],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-389494","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-oil-gas"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/389494","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/39"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=389494"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/389494\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=389494"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=389494"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=389494"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}