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By Bloomberg

Vitol Group, the world’s biggest independent oil trader, said the cost of finding and pumping crude will prevent prices from dropping much lower than where they are now for prolonged periods.

Oil prices will range from $50 a barrel to $70 a barrel in the second half of this year, Ian Taylor, the firm’s chief executive officer, said in an interview at the FT Commodities Global Summit in Lausanne, Switzerland on Tuesday. They’re unlikely to trade below $50 for extended periods because of exploration and production costs, he said. Brent, the global benchmark, traded at about $63 at 9:39 a.m. in on the ICE Futures Europe exchange London.

“U.S. production growth is beginning to slow down and demand is looking quite good for the year, so the combination of all of that means that probably price, if anything, moves up a little bit,” Taylor said.

Oil prices collapsed almost 50 percent last year as OPEC kept pumping at about 30 million barrels a day, insisting producers outside the 12-nation group must help tackle a surplus. U.S. oil production rose to 9.4 million barrels in March, the highest in Energy Information Administration data starting in 1983.