CRUDE OIL PRICING PROSPECTS (Q4 2021) AFTER COVID-19’S OUTBREAK

Since the first half of 2019, the global economy in all its sectors (omitting some sporadic cases) had been tremendously stroked by the massive outbreak of COVID-19 pandemic, and the oil&gas industry is undoubtably one of the few which suffered the most; within it, crude oil faced its third huge price drop since 2008. The colossal decline of global demand for the product, the fulfilment of the vast majority of inland and floating storages in USA and the panic that had been spread through the paper market, determined one of the worst periods in history for the spot and the future market of the black gold. This paper aims to deep into the matter of the impact of the pandemic on the world’s main producers and importers of oil, refined products and gas, to critically assess the possible strategies undertaken by various Nations and companies to overcome this current situation and to investigate which kind of future for crude oil prices some of the most reputable non-integrated trading firms do see. Parallelly, the main focus of the dissertation will be evaluating how crude’s physical market will react to the events of the last year and a half and trying to predict the levels at which we may probably find them in the short term (Q4 2021). In a nutshell, this very paper will demonstrate how the spot prices of crude oil (Brent related) will reach the peak of 80$ pb (per barrel) in Q4 2021.