After seeing strength this morning, the Mar’25 Brent futures continued to rise from $76.80/bbl at 1200 GMT up to $77.50/bbl at 1515 GMT, before declining to $76.30/bbl at 1740 GMT (time of writing). In the news today, the Biden administration has banned oil drilling in large coastal areas ahead of President-elect Trump’s inauguration. President Biden is issuing two Presidential Memoranda to protect more than 625 million acres off the East and West coasts, including the eastern Gulf of Mexico and parts of the Bering Sea in Alaska, indefinitely prohibiting these areas from federal offshore oil and gas leasing. In other news, Sudan has lifted a nearly year-long force majeure on pipelines transporting South Sudan’s oil through Sudan to the Red Sea, Reuters reported citing a letter from Sudan’s Energy Ministry. South Sudan’s crude exports reached an annual peak of 186kb/d in January 2024, falling to 58kb/d by December 2024, according to tanker tracking data compiled by Bloomberg. Finally, India’s SPR is looking to expand its inventories, having issued a notice to private firms inviting them to bid for a storage site of 2.5 million metric tonnes at Padur, according to Reuters. India’s underground SPR storage has a total approximate capacity of 5.33 million metric tonnes of crude oil, as per India’s Ministry of Petroleum and Natural Gas. At the time of writing, the Mar/Apr ’25 and Mar/Sep ’25 Brent futures spreads stand at $0.62/bbl and $2.61/bbl, respectively.
