Analysts see $57 crude next year

Bloomberg

Oil closed in a bear market, but don’t abandon hope. Analysts are looking beyond the current slide to next year for a rebound.
Crude has plunged by more than a fifth in less than two months as refineries created a glut of gasoline while failing to eliminate excess supply of crude. That wrecked refining margins and hurt the earnings of Exxon Mobil Corp., BP Plc and Royal Dutch Shell Plc. Yet, global oil prices will average $57 a barrel in 2017, according to the median of at least 20 analyst estimates compiled by Bloomberg.
Progress will be slow. The crude glut will take a long time to dissipate, meaning only gradual price gains, said Michael Hsueh, a strategist at Deutsche Bank AG. West Texas Intermediate, the U.S. benchmark, will average $49.50 in the fourth quarter before breaking decisively above $50 next year, the analysts say. “We’re looking at a market that’s still in a very slow process of rebalancing and we don’t think that you’ll get a sustainable deficit until the second quarter of 2017,” said Hsueh, who sees oil at $53 next year. “Those deficits are necessary to draw down global inventories, but that will still take until the end of 2018, it appears.”
WTI has fallen 22 percent to $40.06 since early June, taking it past the 20 percent drop that characterizes a bear market. So ends a recovery that saw prices almost double from a 12-year low in February. Supply disruptions from Nigeria to Canada that cut into the global surplus have abated.
While U.S. stockpiles are down from an April peak, they remain far above anything the market has witnessed at this time of year for at least three decades. Worse, gasoline inventories are at unprecedented levels, too, crushing processing profits from a fuel that a few months ago was seen as an industry bright spot.
“The price move down does make sense, given that we still have a huge overhang of oil inventories,” said Gareth Lewis Davies, an energy strategist at BNP Paribas. “There’s a sense that looking at the balances going forward, supply and demand are in parity. That means we’re still left with this overhang.”

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Yet, with oil companies’ capital expenditure reductions set to reach $1 trillion by 2020, Simon Flowers, the Edinburgh-based chief analyst at Wood Mackenzie Ltd., said there’s a “ticking time bomb” that will eventually push prices higher. Such reductions may even push demand above supply as early as the end of this year, said Hans Van Cleef, an ABN Amro energy economist.
The lack of investment “will have a big impact on global supply,” said Van Cleef, who forecast Brent will reach $70 next year. As soon as the market realizes there isn’t an oversupply and that a shortage is imminent, “that should give a huge boost to oil prices,” he said.
As prices begin to rise, the first producers to benefit will be U.S. shale drillers, Flowers said. He expects shale output to bottom early next year before returning to the record level set in 2015 of about 4.5 million barrels a day within two years. Shale production will nearly double to as much as 8.5 million by the middle of the next decade, spurred by cost savings of as much as 40 percent, according to Flowers.