REUTERS
Oil prices resumed their downward trend during global trading on Tuesday, with dealers saying speculation about oversupply on the market was putting pressure on quotes.
June futures for North Sea Brent blend fell by 0.17% to $64.80 per barrel, while June futures for WTI crude oil were down by 0.08% to $59.20 per barrel, Russian information agency Prime reported.
Oversupply of oil in the Atlantic Basin could restrain the growth of prices for the commodity, according to the analysts of Morgan Stanley and Barclays. Unsold stocks of oil from West Africa, Azerbaijan and the North Sea are piling up, resembling the conditions last summer that led to the collapse in world oil prices by about 60%, Bloomberg writes, referring to reports from bank.
"There’s extra oil in the Atlantic basin,” said Tom Finlon the Florida-based director of Energy Analytics Group LLC.
“There are North Sea cargoes floating around, and a large number from Nigeria. We’re also seeing some oil get out of Libya, even with the chaos in that country.”
According to Barclays, in the first week of May some 80 million barrels of oil from Nigeria and Angola remained unsold. This is the equivalent of about three weeks of the combined production of those countries, according to data compiled by Bloomberg
"Key physical crude oil market indicators in the Atlantic Basin are showing signs of weakness at present, highlighting the disconnect between the futures and physical markets,” Miswin Mahesh, an analyst at Barclays in London, said in a report.
Since the summer of last year, oil quotations have declined by more than half, hitting the level of $45 per barrel for Brent at the beginning of this year. OPEC's decision of November 2014 to maintain oil production quotas at 30 million barrels per day prompted a decline in prices.
Meanwhile, in late January - early February, oil prices demonstrated some growth reaching a level of $60 per barrel for Brent oil. But on May 7,world oil prices retreated again.