Oil commentary - 3 March 2021

Morning all. Brent is trading this morning at $63.12 up 0.42 and WTi is trading at $60.02 up 0.28. Welcome to OPEC day. These only used to be twice a year, and everyone would be huddled around OPEC TV waiting for oil ministers to make an appearance. You'd be all excited, oooh OPEC dayyy yeyyy, probably have an OPEC shirt on or something. Then an hour later, you're still watching the OPEC egg timer because oil ministers are always late. Two hours go past and by that time you need a coffee, go and grab one, come back and you've missed the press conference. We won't hear what the outcome is until tomorrow I imagine but fear not, I offer my thoughts on a separate note which will be on a screen near you in about three hours. Keep your eyes out for oil minister headlines throughout the day. Apart from OPEC what else is going on? Well, it's Wednesday and that means EIA data, and this week is important. The Texas freeze is well and truly over, snowball fights have been replaced with water pistols in a matter of two weeks. Greta!!!!! anyway, yes USGC are getting back to normal but US oil production is returning quicker than those shut down refineries are. Some are back but the notable ones i.e., Motiva (600kpbpd), Baytown (560kbpd) and Marathon's 585kbpd Galveston Bay refineries are not expected to be fully operational for another two weeks. That's a chunk of refining capacity offline. This means we can expect sizeable crude builds in the US. Granted, refinery runs are down, and this will be evidenced later but I wonder if the bulls will acknowledge these crude builds and react accordingly because if it was the other way round then they could make OPEC’s job a lot easier for them than anybody. Let's see what happens. Good day.