The Jan’25 Brent futures contract initially traded rangebound around high $73/bbl levels this afternoon, before falling to $72.30/bbl level at 18:00 GMT (time of writing). There was a brief spike to $74.25/bbl just before 14:45 GMT as a Bloomberg report revealed that OPEC+ had begun talks on delaying the restart of oil production again. In the news today, Russian crude exports dropped in the four weeks to 24 November to an average 3.12mb/d of crude oil amid lower shipments to India, tanker-tracking data compiled by Bloomberg showed. This was down by 150kb/d compared to the four-week average to 17 November. In other news, a fire at Pemex’s Salina Cruz refinery was successfully extinguished, with authorities reporting no damage or injuries, as per Quantum Commodity Intelligence. Finally, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov stated that it is unlikely Gazprom will agree to handover ownership of Nord Stream 2 to US businessman Stephen P. Lynch, who sought a US license to try to buy the pipeline. At the time of writing, the Jan/Feb’25 and Jan/Jul’25 Brent futures spreads stand at $0.50/bbl and $1.38/bbl, respectively.
