The Feb’25 Brent futures contract has seen marginal strength this morning, trading from $72.40/bbl at 07:00 GMT up to $72.65/bbl at 10:25 GMT (time of writing). With the OPEC+ ministerial meeting on production policy taking place today on 05 Dec, traders are anticipating potential news of OPEC+ delaying production hikes further into Q1’25. In the news today, Shell and Equinor are to combine their UK offshore oil and gas assets in a 50-50 joint venture, Financial Times reported. The project, which will be based in Aberdeen, will take over Equinor’s stakes in three North Sea fields and Shell’s stakes in nine, adding to a combined production capacity of around 138kb/d. In other news, Unipetrol stated that Russian crude oil flows to the Czech Republic through the Druzhba pipeline remain halted, with a Unipetrol spokesman claiming he did not know the reason for the stoppage, as per Reuters. Finally, Rosneft has invested $20 billion in India recently, the Indian government quoted Russian President Putin as saying in a statement on Thursday, according to Reuters. At the time of writing, the Feb/Mar’25 and Feb/Aug’25 Brent futures spreads stand at $0.41/bbl and $1.54/bbl, respectively.
