Where are oil and gas prices heading towards?

  • 7 months ago
If you live in Europe could the cost of petrol be about to go up at your local forecourt?
The prognoses of the price of #oil and #gas would be different depending on what part of the world you are in. However, it seems like it would be a challenging situation overall.
#costofliving #economy #crisis #politics
Transcript
00:00 First of all, I think on the actual oil price itself, whenever there is a crisis of this kind,
00:06 oil prices tend to shoot up quickly and then settle afterwards. I don't think that it will
00:13 have a long-lasting significant impact on the oil price. We have to remember that the one region of
00:20 the world that's really hit by this crisis in the Red Sea is Europe. So Asia is going to be able to
00:29 get its crude oil and its products and its natural gas as usual. The US doesn't buy very much from
00:36 the Middle East, so it's really an impact on Europeans. And it means that their supply lines
00:43 are now much, much longer than they were when the oil could just come up through the Suez Canal.
00:48 And I think this is going to create a lot of challenges in shipping. Some companies are going
00:56 to find that they have lower inventories than they thought they would. So it will have an impact
01:04 on those refiners in the European area and also on shipping costs, because we need to ship all
01:12 the way around Africa rather than the much shorter route. Okay, so it's really focused on Europe. Are
01:19 there any countries in particular that are most affected? And you mentioned shipping around Africa.
01:25 Are there other solutions that countries are looking at to get those ships or other forms
01:30 of transport to get the oil that they need? Well, there are obviously other sources of crude
01:37 available, but Europe now is not buying any crude from Russia. And Russia was a very big supplier
01:46 of crude oil to the European market. Now that crude actually has to go the other way.
01:52 And it too can't go through the Suez. It's going to have to go through Africa.
01:56 So that's one that's taken away from the table. Other crudes such as Kazakh crude, I guess,
02:03 are being used or North African are being used as much as they can anyway because of the Russian
02:08 situation. So I just think that they're going to have to deal with bringing this crude from further
02:15 away. The Mediterranean region in particular, I think, will be more heavily hit because the
02:22 refineries in the Mediterranean rely more on Middle Eastern crude than the ones up in the
02:26 northwest of Europe. And you said that you don't see a long lasting impact on oil prices. But what
02:34 do you think is going to happen in the short term? What's going to happen when the markets open
02:37 tomorrow? The oil price may go up a little bit more. I don't expect very much more.
02:46 We are in a market where oil prices have been declining. The market appears to be well supplied
02:54 in general. So in that kind of market, even these impacts don't really push the price up that much.
03:00 If we are in a much tighter market, maybe that would be different. I do think, though,
03:04 that the price of diesel is going to go up a lot in the European market. Europe used to get most
03:10 of its imports of diesel from Russia. It's currently getting a lot more diesel from east
03:16 of Suez, from the Middle East, from India, even from as far away as China. And so European diesel
03:24 supply chains are going to be very impacted. And I think it has more impact on diesel prices than
03:29 it does on oil prices.

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