Oil prices near $100 per barrel raise questions over demand destruction

Supply cuts from heavyweight crude producers have helped drive oil prices near $100 per barrel — fueling some to consider the potential for future demand destruction.

Brent crude futures rose 63 cents per barrel from the Thursday settlement to $96.01 per barrel on Friday at 11 a.m. London time and sit well above prices observed in the first half of the year.

The gains could prove short lived, some analysts warn. Sushant Gupta, research director of Asia refining at Wood Mackenzie, on Monday said “there are all signs that we could potentially see $100 per barrel in quarter four,” but warned that global economic fragility and incoming seasonal demand drops in the first quarter would make this unsustainable long term. In a Friday report, ING analysts signaled the oil market is “clearly in overbought territory.”

At the heart of price support are a series of voluntary cuts that fall outside of the official policy of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries and its allies, known as OPEC+. First is a 1.66 million-barrel-per-day decline implemented by some OPEC+ members until the end of 2024. Topping this, Saudi Arabia and Russia pledged to respectively remove another 1 million barrel per day of production and 300,000 barrels per day of exports until the end of this year.

This adds to a picture of improving Chinese demand — which analysts say could soon peak — and inventory drops. 

Some say buyers can weather the storm of high prices. Seven European refiners and traders, who spoke under anonymity because of contractual obligations, told CNBC that local buyers can withstand oil prices veering into triple digits without lowering their output runs. All of the sources pointed to firm refining margins, meaning the difference between the value of refined products and the price of the crude feedstock to generate them is favorable.

Uncertainty lingers over further China fuel export quotas, while Russia’s indefinite ban of its fuel exports — which Europe cannot purchase because of sanctions that followed Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine — has tightened availabilities of refined products and could particularly worsen global diesel shortages. Sanctions-disrupted access to Russian crude and OPEC+ cuts have shrunk availabilities of high-density and high-sulfur crude to Western buyers, encumbering their task to produce certain refined products.

Refinery margins so far have nevertheless been attractive enough that some refiners have lightened their seasonal maintenance to take advantage, one refiner said. Refined oil product demand could yet stay strong in the West, as Thanksgiving and winter vacations boost travel in the U.S. and Europe, and the hurricane season looms — which can historically disrupt both local refining and crude production. 

“We estimate a high-impact hurricane event this year could result in a temporary loss of monthly offshore crude oil production of about 1.5 million barrels per day (b/d) and a nearly equivalent temporary loss of refining capacity,” the U.S. Energy Information Administration said in July.

“Outages on that scale could increase monthly average U.S. retail gasoline prices by between 25 cents per gallon and 30 cents per gallon.”

Some European market participants polled by CNBC doubted triple-digit oil prices are sustainable in the long term, with three pointing to possible demand destruction — where customers gradually answer persistently high prices with fewer purchases. A fourth said demand destruction is a potential question, once prices hit $110 per barrel.

“Sometimes high oil prices can become a self-fulfilling prophecy,” Indian Energy Minister Hardeep Singh Puri warned in August. “The self-fulfilling prophecy means that at a particular point of time comes a tipping, and then there’s a fall of demand.”