The spot price of West Texas Intermediate (WTI) will average $73.62 per barrel this year.
That’s according to the US Energy Information Administration’s (EIA) latest Short-Term Energy Outlook (STEO), which was released earlier this month.
Broken down quarterly, the EIA’s May STEO sees the WTI spot price at $72.50 per barrel in the second quarter and $73 per barrel in both the third and fourth quarters of 2023.
In its previous STEO, which was released in April, the EIA saw the WTI spot price reaching $79.24 a barrel in 2023. That STEO projected the commodity to average $80 in the second quarter of this year, $81 per barrel in the third. quarter and $80 per barrel in the fourth quarter.
The WTI spot price averaged $94.91 per barrel in 2022, the EIA’s latest STEO noted.
According to a Standard Chartered report recently sent to Rigzone, WTI will average $88 per barrel this year. The report saw the commodity reaching $85 a barrel in the third quarter of 2023 and $91 a barrel in the fourth quarter. Standard Chartered made the same price projections in a separate report sent to Rigzone last month.
Analysts at Standard Chartered noted in the company’s latest report that speculative shorts in the four main Brent and WTI contracts had increased by 90 million barrels and that speculative longs had fallen by 110 million barrels.
In another report sent to Rigzone this month, BMI, a Fitch Solutions company, revealed that it saw the price of WTI crude oil averaging $81 per barrel in 2023. In a report sent to Rigzone in late In March, Fitch Solutions Country Risk & Industry Research noted that it saw the price of WTI crude averaging $88 per barrel this year.
The average response of 145 oil and gas company executives when asked what they expected the WTI price to be at the end of 2023, as part of the Dallas Fed’s first-quarter Energy Survey 2023, which was released in March, was $79.64 per barrel.
The low forecast in that survey was $50 per barrel, while the high forecast was $160 per barrel. The WTI price during the survey’s collection period, which spanned March 15-23, averaged $68.51 per barrel.
At the time of writing, WTI is trading at $71.92 per barrel. The highest close for the commodity in 2023 year-to-date was seen on January 26 at $87.47 per barrel, and the lowest close in 2023 year-to-date was seen on March 17 at 66, $74 per barrel.
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