What drives the oil and gas prices down - against all odds?

 

US Crude oil stocks April 19 forecast

The price of crude oil and LNG, liquefied natural gas, started falling on Tuesday - quite unexpectedly.
In fact, the crude oil market braced themselves for the polar opposite, especially in light of the new major offensive by Russia in the east of Ukraine.
As of 16:30 GMT, the price of WTI, Brent and LNG were $102.79, $107.69 and $6.99 respectively, recording a steep fall relative to what they had been the previous day.
Last week, there was a huge US crude inventory build, confirmed by both the API, American Petroleum Institute and EIA, US Energy Information Administration; the API indicated the figure as 7.757 million barrels; their own estimate for the same was 1.367 million barrels.
For the last week, the API estimated a crude build of 2.533 million barrels; the actual data is yet to be released, perhaps later during the day.
The significant drop of the prices of crude oil and gases, in this context, may be due an estimated yet another significant US crude build during the past week.
If that is the case, analysts will be to eager to analyse the data from the EIA regarding the same on Wednesday in order to gauge the consistency of the crude build, if any.
In Europe, meanwhile, the nations that rely on Russian oil and gas are scrambling for finding alternatives.
Although they appear to be calling for sanctions against Russia in unison, unavoidable cracks are appearing in the outer core of the alliance; certain countries such as Hungary says that it is prepared to pay for Russian fuels in roubles - in line with the Russian demand. 

 

 

All in all, even if the prices of fuel come down, the volatility in the markets are going  to remain for months to come.

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