The price of Brent crude, the global benchmark, ticked down 0.1% to $84 a barrel in Friday, but is still up 3.9% this week. The winning streak is the longest since an eight-week rally ended in early February 2022. US oil prices are also set for a 3.9% gain this week, and have chalked up their longest rally since April 2022. That has spurred a jump in US gasoline prices, which hit an average of $3.73 a gallon on Friday, their highest level since mid-November 2022.
, an alliance of the world’s major producers. The group, which includes the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries , Russia and other smaller producers — pledged in April to slash output by more than 1.6 million barrels a day through the end of the year — in response to an almost 38% drop in oil prices from their peak last year. “The recent price uptick has been driven primarily by
’s voluntary production cuts announced in April,” Giovanni Staunovo, a strategist at investment bank UBS, told CNN. Staunovo said additional voluntary cuts announced by Saudi Arabia — the world’s biggest exporter of crude oil — earlier this month would further tighten oil markets. Riyadh said that it would extend a production cut of one million barrels a day at least until the end of August. The cut was initially planned to last for the month of July.
’s production cuts were the main driver behind rising oil prices, but the jump was also “being supported by resilient demand in developed market economies,” Edward Gardner, a commodities economist at Capital Economics, told CNN. Gardner said that he expects the global oil market to swing from a supply surplus of 800,000 barrels per day in the first half of the year to a deficit of 1.2 million barrels per day in the second half.