Oil commentary - 27 July 2017

Morning all. Brent closed up 0.77 last night to $50.97 and WTi closed at $48.75 up 0.96. Stats yesterday proved helpful for the bulls and up we went past $50 per bbl on Brent quicker than you can say "More shale please". Crude is up more than 5% since last Friday so a pretty impressive rally has been witnessed and why not? All the signs are actually starting to point in the right direction for the dreaded "glut" to stop being written about and for the world to start balancing the amount of oil it has readily available. It's funny you know, Wednesday's are always the day that people look to for short term demand direction in the form of EIA data but is that tide turning? It is clear that the USA now have a clear energy independence agenda and Trump and his administration have come good on their original manifesto in that the domestic energy sector is slowly deregulating and production of crude and thus exports continue to rise. Let's not forget that when Trumpy won the election on 8 November, flat price was round $46 per barrel. So even in the face of low prices the US have has still ramped up production. All this production has led to the US producers investing in export infrastructure, take the LOOP for eg, it is currently the only place to load a VLCC but others are building deepwater ports in the USGC to export some of the Permian's finest. So if the US eventually become a net exporter why would EIA data make any difference to the market? Hmmmm, other indicators need to be looked at but until those are sought, the oil world will still watch Wednesday’s in the only way it knows how. Good day.