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Price fluctuations to increase in energy market: forecasts

3 January 2019 11:25 (UTC+04:00)
Price fluctuations to increase in energy market: forecasts

By Trend

The price of oil will cycle around $60 until the mid to late 2020s before the effects of conservation and increased renewables start pushing the price down, Trend reports citing the World Economic League Table 2019 (WELT) of the Centre for Economics and Business Research (Cebr).

"A year ago we made an aggressive forecast for oil prices that had them falling to $40 by 2032. In retrospect that was probably too aggressive and it now seems likely that growth of demand in some non-OECD countries will be more robust than had been assumed when we made the forecast. Nevertheless, though energy price forecasting is a dangerous game, it seems clear that at some point the competition from cheaper energy and suppression of oil demand by regulation will push prices down," said WELT.

The report said it seems increasingly clear that the price is fragmenting both between regions and between sources of energy.

"For most of the 2015-2017 period there was little price difference between Brent Crude and West Texas Intermediate, the two benchmark oil prices in Europe and the US. But increasing US supply, a surplus of US coastal shipping capacity and weaker European supplies have led to a gap of nearly $6/barrel emerging between the two. This gap is expected to persist for the next two years," said WELT.

Meanwhile, the report shows that the price of LNG, which historically ran at about 75 percent of the price of crude oil on an energy equivalent basis, has in the past 10 years varied from 10 percent to 200 percent of the price of oil and is currently close to its 10 year average of about 35 percent. "Increased supplies from a range of sources including fracking in the US have been responsible for this."

With increasing interconnection of the global gas market and growing complexity of the energy sector, it is likely that both price fluctuations and divergences will increase, according to WELT.

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