00:00 Speaker A
Ines, all prices are higher today, and we’ve had some quite interesting news from the oil cartel OPEC Plus. Can you tell us a bit more about this?
00:09 Speaker B
Yeah, so OPEC Plus deciding to increase output by 137,000 barrels per day. And normally when you see OPEC Plus increasing output, you see a downward pressure on oil prices, but you’re seeing an upward pressure right now on oil prices. And part of that is because the street was expecting uh more of a raise. So perhaps this is a more of a modest uh raise than what the street had been expecting. And more modest also than what OPEC has been doing over the past few months, because remember that OPEC has been increasing output since April by 411,000 barrels per day uh in July uh by 555,000 in September. So this is really a modest increase. So perhaps the market had gotten a little bit of ahead of itself. Last week, you saw a decline for the week of 3%. On Friday, you saw oil prices selling off. Goldman Sachs came out with a note basically saying that this leaves their price targets unchanged for 2025 and 2026. They are seeing that Brent is going to average $64 per barrel in 2025. That’s lower than what we’re seeing right now. and also in 2026, they’re expecting Brent to average $56 per barrel. So, that’s because of oversupply in the market.
02:00 Speaker A
But that could even change a little bit more though, because we’re having more more news of potentially more sanctions against Russian oil. So maybe that could be could weigh the other way? No?
02:16 Speaker B
Yeah, and look, there’s been a lot of talk about more sanctions on Russian oil and what the US is going to do. The EU wants the US to uh put sanctions uh more sanctions on Russia because it’s saying that uh they wants to end the war in Ukraine. But what’s interesting is is that um uh the Energy Secretary, Chris Wright has basically said, look, if the EU wants more sanctions then they should uh really not buy energy from Russia and be buying more energy from the US because the US has been pushing for a lot more LNG, liquefied natural gas exports. and the EU is planning to buy more uh LNG from the US. Uh but nonetheless, uh it it has been making this push for for more and uh the EU is drafting up some rules to phase out their energy dependence on Russia by 2028. There are so those some states that are opposed to some of these rules. so we’ll have to see how all of that shakes out. But certainly more sanctions on Russia would certainly impact at least in the short term, uh it may have some impact on oil prices.
