Market Commentary

Amos Hochstein, the special presidential coordinator for global infrastructure and energy security said the US could begin to refill its SPR as soon as the third quarter of 2023, if the price is right. However, he cautioned that the timeline would depend on a number of factors, including maintenance on […]

The Fed is expected to raise rates by another quarter point of a percentage at the next meeting. These rate hikes have been the most aggressive in 40 years and that is putting pressure on energy prices. Concerns about higher rates impacting the economy negatively and energy demand have been […]

Data from China was positive overnight helping to support markets. China’s economy grew faster than expected with first quarter GDP up 4.5%. The data also showed that refinery throughput was up in March by 8.8% from the prior year. Balancing out the positive China news is the ongoing concerns of […]

The Baker Hughes Rig Count had oil rigs down 2 to a total of 588 oil rigs and last year at this time oil rigs number 548. The outlook is that rigs would stay fairly stable in this range and that US production will be relatively flat going froward unless […]

Crude oil prices have managed to show gains in each of the last three weeks. This is the longest upside trend so far this year. The OPEC+ announcement of additional cuts was the driving news that overshadowed the ongoing concerns about weak demand. Bloomberg reports the International Monetary Fund has […]

As a reminder, all contracts with MFA Oil are take or pay. The gallons on all contracts need to be used up by the end date of the contract. The DOE inventory report had crude oil inventories down 3.74 million barrels, Gasoline inventories down 4.12 million and distillates down 3.63 […]

The API called crude stocks down 4.346 million barrels, gasoline down 3.970 million and distillates down 3.693 million. The crude oil stocks at Cushion, Ok were also called down 1.035 million. The average estimates for today’s DOE inventor report from the Bloomberg survey is for crude oil to be down […]

Crude oil prices rose by more than 6% yesterday upon the surprising news that OPEC + was going to make additional voluntary cuts to oil output for May through December of 2023 in addition to their already agreed upon 2 million bpd oil cuts this year. The additional voluntary oil […]

The Baker Hughes Rig Count had oil rigs down 1 to a total of 592 and last year at this time there were 533 oil rigs in operation. Crude oil production continues to hover right around 12 million barrels per day. Energy markets were higher on the day Friday as […]

The energy markets were under selling pressure yesterday on comments made by US Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm, who stated that it would be difficult to take advantage of the current low oil prices for the US Strategic Petroleum Reserve this year. Last year, 180 million barrels had been sold from […]

Propane inventories showed a 2.267 million barrel decline putting total stocks at 58.703 million and last year they were 33.564, 25.139 million more than last year, which is 75% more. Midwest inventories were down 324,000 putting total Midwest inventories at 13.185 million and last year there were 8.680. Gulf Coast […]

After the aggressive sell off these energy markets haves seen they are likely to see a corrective bounce. Near term the markets are likely to see prices testing higher but at this point any move higher needs to be seen as corrective and another leg lower is still needed, especially […]