Brent quotas with high compliance, but US oil stocks building

Malcolm Graham-Wood Independent Analyst

The April Brent contract rolled over yesterday, in itself a quite exciting pattern of trading by recent standards. The independent surveyors I was talking about the other day started promptly with Reuters first out of the blocks to give a 94% adherence to quotas in February. The USA provides the counterbalance, production rates are rising but nowhere near enough to do anything more than marginally affect world supply and demand. Stocks are still building though and the API reported a rise of 2.5m in crude oil stocks with 500/- at Cushing and with gasoline stocks unexpectedly up and distillates sharply down traders were perplexed. Now March is a traditionally difficult time to call movements upstream or downstream, historically it is a peak month for refinery maintenance so crude stocks build but hopefully product stocks fall, we shall see.

Author

Malcolm Graham-Wood

Independent Analyst

Malcolm Graham-Wood started his City career as a trainee analyst at Wood Mackenzie and then cut a swathe through a number of broking houses, all the time building up his knowledge and love of the upstream oil and gas industry incl

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