An oil extraction facility in Loving County (Texas, USA), at the end of 2019. ANGUS MORDANT (REUTERS)
From $20 to almost $100 in less than two years.
The barrel of Brent crude oil, the benchmark in Europe, has gone from its lowest level in two decades in record time to being on the verge of triple digits, an unprecedented threshold in the last eight years and that threatens to put even more pressure on the inflation and slow down the economic recovery after the pandemic.
The growing tension between Russia and Ukraine, a key border in the transit of oil to Europe, is the most immediate trigger for the escalation.
Not in vain, Moscow is the third largest producer on the planet and runs, together with Saudi Arabia, the threads of the expanded cartel of exporters, the so-called OPEC+.
But there is more ground swell: inventories, at unusually low levels, play a fundamental role in a rise that complicates things for importers, including Spain and most European countries.
Oil demand has recovered much faster than could be expected at the height of the pandemic, when all planes were grounded and services were running at half throttle.
After the break, the reality has been very different from what was expected: energy consumption is one step away from the pre-pandemic level and supply, on the other hand, remains at artificially low levels due to a decision by OPEC+ and due to the low investment in exploration and production in recent years.
This imbalance in market forces, increased in recent weeks by the threat of invasion of Ukraine by Russia, is taking crude oil to levels that seemed to be in the past.
More information
Saudi Arabia transfers Aramco shares valued at more than 70,000 million to its sovereign wealth fund
"The oil shock fuels the inflation problem even more," says the head of global economic analysis at Deutsche Bank, Peter Hooper, in statements collected by Bloomberg.
"There is no less chance that it will reduce global growth significantly," he says.
In recent years, technicians have established a band of between 60 and 80 dollars per barrel as the best for economic expansion: in it, they said, both importing countries —without great pressure on fuels— and exporters —who obtain a non-negligible margin—.
With the barrel on the verge of 100 dollars, however, the picture changes completely: this is very good news for the Persian Gulf and, to a lesser extent, Russia, and bad news for Europe, China and India, which have to look outside everything. the crude they consume and whose citizens are already suffering from the pressure of gasoline at record highs.
