Crude Oil Futures

  The monthly OPEC+ meeting ended with no significant change in policy, with members agreeing to maintain the status-quo; that means, the members are collectively adding additional 400,000 bpd in March too. The group was much more optimistic about the short-term demand than they were in the last quarter, 2021. The cartel, however, still think that there will be a crude oil surplus in 2022, exactly the way they anticipated, but less than what they dreaded. The reference to this aspect, analysts believe, is to mitigate the frustration felt by leading consumer nations such as the US, China, India and Japan. The pleas by large global consumers have already fallen on deaf years and they in turn have resorted to releasing the SPRs, Strategic Petroleum Reserves – with not much luck yet, though. The crude oil markets long anticipated the mood of the oil producers and the price of Brent crude oil even crossed the politically-sensitive $90 a barrel this week. The price of LNG, liquefi

  The rise of oil price continues unabated as the oil producing regions experience serious political upheavals. The desperate measures such as the release of SPRs, the Strategic Petroleum Reserves, did very little to mitigate the impact on the consumer grievances in the face of rising inflation. The price of natural gas also spiked this week in proportion to the intensity of the sound bites between the West and Russia; Qatar, the world’s largest natural gas exporter until December, last year, has already said that the former is not a substitute for Russia in the event of a military conflict; having become the major exporter to the gas-starved Europe, the US managed to claim the top spot recently. The uncertainties have taken its toll on the prices of the LNG despite the proactive intervention of the US. As of Friday, 28 January, the LNG was traded at $4.614 per m 3 . The rise in price of the LNG is adding an extra weight on any hindrance that could potentially keep the prices o