Unless OPEC increases output, oil market will fall into deficit after Russian invasion, IEA says

Russia’s invasion of its neighbor has prompted Western nations to levy harsh sanctions on Moscow and the Russian economy. While only some nations–including the U.S.–have banned Russian oil imports outright, traders, energy companies, and shipping firms are shunning Russian crude, fearful of the reputational risk, the IEA said.

The impact could mean 3 million barrels a day of Russian supply effectively cut off from global markets
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starting next month, the IEA said. The agency slashed its forecast for global oil supply this year by 2 million barrels a day to 99.5 million barrels a day, based on what major producers of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries have currently agreed to pump.

The lost supply has sent energy prices surging. Oil prices have jumped to multiyear highs while prices for natural gas, gasoline, and also coal have also spiked. Other commodities upon which the global economy depends and which are produced in significant amounts in Russia, such as some metals and basic foodstuffs like wheat, have also jumped in price.

Those higher prices will “increase inflation, reduce household purchasing power and are likely to trigger policy reactions from central banks world-wide–with a strong negative impact on growth,” the agency said.

The result will also mean a blow to oil demand, but not by enough to balance the lost Russian supply. Demand for oil will be 1 million barrels a day less this year than the IEA was expecting last month at 99.6 million barrels a day. The IEA also cuts its forecasts for oil demand growth this year by 1.1 million barrels a day, to 2.1 million barrels a day.

The oil market will slip into a deficit as early as the second quarter unless the OPEC group of oil producers increase their supply levels, the IEA said. Beyond the spare capacity of leading OPEC members Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, there are no other sources of additional supply that can balance the market with oil inventories having already been depleted to multiyear lows and the prospect of additional supplies from Iran seemingly a long way off.

The warning highlights how the situation in Ukraine is also increasingly looking like a political headache for OPEC which since 2016 has struck an uneasy alliance with Russia and a group of other oil-producing countries, known as OPEC+.

The cartel has rebuffed pressure from major Western oil consumers to increase the pace of its monthly supply hikes which have so far been capped at 400,000 barrels a day. Doing so could appear to be taking sides–against Russia.

There were signs that a U.S. diplomatic push urging Gulf oil producers to pump more was working. The United Arab Emirates said last week that it would push other OPEC members to pump more oil.

The issue has been compounded by OPEC+’s own inability to meet its supply targets, due in part to ailing oil infrastructure in some member countries. The group’s output lags its targets by 1.1 million barrels, the IEA says.

The IEA has taken its own steps to ease oil-market tightness. Its members agreed earlier this month to release around 60 million barrels of oil from emergency stockpiles, but the amount was seen as too little to have a meaningful impact. The IEA said that its members were ready to release more crude from inventories.

Write to Will Horner at [email protected]