Although crude oil prices fell from seven-year highs in early New York trade on Monday, evidence that major suppliers are struggling to boost supply to meet global demand kept prices steady.
U.S. oil futures were up 1.2 percent at $82.66 a barrel at 9:40 ET (1340 GMT), having earlier touched an all-time high of $83.14 a barrel.
Benchmark Brent crude futures were up 0.8% at $85.55 per barrel.
United States Gasoline RBOB Futures, however, rose by 0.5%, reaching $2.4990 per gallon, a new seven-year high.
Unnamed sources close to the group told Bloomberg that the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) produced on average 750,000 less barrels per day than the agreement’s cap in September, according to Bloomberg.
It was linked by some to Nigerian and Angolan under-investment difficulties in the past.
The OPEC’s fourth-largest producer, Kuwait, reported that its sustainable output capacity fell by an average of 227,000 barrels a day to 2.579 million barrels a day in its fiscal 2021 year, to 2.579 million barrels a day.
A growing global demand due to the lifting of pandemic-related movement restrictions is worsening the supply-demand mismatch seen among OPEC countries who are failing to achieve output objectives at this time.
It has already been three years since global inventories have been so low.
Japan became the latest net energy importer to call on OPEC and its partners to do more to keep prices in check. Japan is calling on them to do more.
Energy-intensive industries and utilities in locations where gas and coal costs have caused them to curtail output fear that high energy prices would kill the economic recovery, and Japan is no exception.
The world’s second-largest economy – and its largest oil importer – slowed more severely than predicted in the third quarter, providing some respite on the demand side. China is also the world’s largest consumer of oil.
Because of Covid-19-driven lockdowns that limited mobility and a growing energy crisis that hampered industrial demand, independent refiners in China, often known as “teapots,” decreased their throughput to the lowest level in 16 months.
