Oil is near $ 80… and “Goldman Sachs” expects $ 90...

Oil prices rose during trading on Monday, for the fifth day in a row, and Brent reached its highest level since October 2018, and is heading towards $ 80 a barrel, amid concerns about supply at a time when demand is increasing in some regions of the world with the easing of pandemic measures.
Brent crude rose 1.6 percent to $79.39 a barrel by 15:01 GMT, after recording last week’s third consecutive weekly increase. US crude rose 1.7 percent to $75.28 a barrel, near its highest price since July, after recording its fifth consecutive weekly increase last week.
This comes at a time when Goldman Sachs raised its forecast for the price of Brent crude by the end of the year by $10 to $90 a barrel due to the recovery in fuel demand at a faster rate than expected from the repercussions of the spread of the delta mutated from the Corona virus and the impact of Hurricane Ida on American production, which led to dwindling global supplies.
Goldman Sachs said: “We have long had a positive outlook for oil prices, but the deficit between supply and demand is currently larger than our expectations, with global demand recovering from the impact of the delta shift faster than our previous unanimous forecast and with global supplies remaining at levels lower than our previous expectations.”
The recovery in demand surprised the member countries of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) and its allies, the group known as OPEC +, and they faced difficulties in raising production with the continued lack of investment and the postponement of maintenance work due to the pandemic.
Meanwhile, producers and traders in the oil sector expected yesterday that global demand for fuel will return to pre-pandemic levels (Covid-19) by early next year with the economy rid of the consequences of the pandemic, but the excess refining capacity will likely pressure those expectations.
Sector leaders said that despite the continued increase in cases of the disease in many markets, which affected the recovery of demand for some refining products such as jet fuel, consumption trends for gasoline and diesel indicated higher growth.
These statements were made at the 2021 Platts Petroleum Asia-Pacific Conference, which is being held in a hybrid form this year, as it includes both real and virtual participants.
“We’ve seen refining margins recover as demand recovers,” said Eugene Leung, president of BP Singapore and chief executive of BP’s trade and shipping arm in Asia Pacific and the Middle East. production.”
He continued, saying in a pre-recorded speech to the conference: “Most likely, the excess (refining) capacity will reduce to some degree those margins.”
Greg Hill, President of Hess Corp., an American oil and gas producer, said that the company expects global demand to return to pre-pandemic levels, which were 100 million barrels per day, by the end of this year or early 2022.
The International Energy Agency also predicted a strong recovery from the fourth quarter, based on “strong pent-up demand and continued progress in vaccination campaigns” to prevent (Covid-19).
And it expected that the average global demand for oil in 2021 would reach 96.1 million barrels per day and 99.4 million barrels per day in 2022, compared to recording 90.0 million barrels per day in 2020. OPEC expected that the average demand in the fourth quarter of this year will reach 99.70 million barrels per day.