Brent crude reaches the peak of 2019 at $ 65

Brent crude reached $ 65 a barrel on Friday morning, hitting the highest price since the beginning of the year and the highest since November, while Saudi Arabia's largest-than-expected cuts OPEC's willingness to rebalance the market outweighed concerns about the slowdown in the global economy this week.

On Friday at 10:20 am EST, WTI crude traded up 1.60% to $ 55.27. Brent Brude was up 1.44% to $ 65.50.

Earlier this week, Saudi Arabia told the market that it would exceed its share of OPEC production cuts, fueling a rise in oil prices. In an interview published Tuesday by the Financial Times, Saudi Energy Minister Khalid al-Falih said that the Saudis would reduce their production to 9.8 million bpd in March, about 500,000 bpd below commitment made in January by OPEC +.

OPEC's monthly report released on Tuesday indicated that OPEC's total production in January (the beginning of the new cuts) had fallen by 797,000 barrels a day, to an average of 30.81 million barrels a day. Saudi Arabia reduced production from 350,000 b / d in December to 10.213 billion b / d in January, and its Gulf of Kuwait allies, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates (UAE), have also greatly reduced their production.

Oil prices continued to rise early Wednesday, also supported by the report released Tuesday by the American Petroleum Institute (API), which indicated a pulling of 998,000 barrels of crude oil for the week ending on February 8, compared to forecasts of analysts who expected a buildup of crude oil. stocks up to 2,300 million barrels.

The EIA inventory report later Wednesday showed an accumulation of crude oil inventories of 3.6 million barrels. Still, oil prices continued to climb, with investors focused on OPEC and Saudi Arabia cuts and on optimism that ongoing trade negotiations between the United States and China could come to some sort of agreement.

On Friday, oil prices were also corroborated by reports of a partial closure of the huge Saudi oilfield Safaniyah in Saudi Arabia, which has a production capacity of 1.2 million barrels per day of oil. heavy.

By Tsvetana Paraskova for Oilprice.com

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