By Adedapo Adesanya
Fitch Solutions Country Risk & Industry Research has kept its Brent crude forecasts out to 2025 unchanged, the company’s latest oil price outlook report has revealed.
The company’s June report sees Brent price averaging $66 per barrel this year, $64 per barrel in 2022, $65 per barrel in 2023, $70 per barrel in 2024, and $72 per barrel in 2025. These forecasts are the same as the ones in the company’s May report.
The Bloomberg Consensus, which was also highlighted in the report and which Fitch Solutions is a contributor, sees Brent averaging $65 per barrel in 2021 and 2022, $64.5 per barrel in 2023, $65 per barrel in 2024 and $65.9 per barrel in 2025.
Last month, Fitch Solutions’ May report, the Bloomberg Consensus saw Brent averaging $64 per barrel in 2021, $64.5 per barrel in 2022, $65.3 per barrel in 2023, $65 per barrel in 2024, and $66 per barrel in 2025.
“Brent finally closed above the key resistance of $70 per barrel on June 1 after testing that level on several occasions during 2021,” analysts at Fitch Solutions stated in the company’s June oil price outlook.
“There is scope for prices to hold above this level in the coming months with a number of bullish triggers forming on the horizon, including strong demand signals from markets that appear to be re-emerging from COVID-19-related headwinds such as the United States, Europe, and China,” the analysts added in the report.
“However, there are still few downside risks, not least in the form of re-surging Covid-19 infections in parts of Asia. The number of daily new infections in India have more than halved from its peak in early May, although significant risks remain, including the over-burdened domestic healthcare system and threats from the emergence of other non-Covid infectious diseases such as the black fungus,” the analysts continued.
Analysts warned in the report that a few other markets across South and South East Asia are also seeing relapses in infections, which they highlighted have prompted governments to re-introduce strict containment measures, including partial lockdowns.
Currently, there are over 172 million confirmed cases of COVID-19 globally, with 3.7 million deaths, according to the latest information from the World Health Organization (WHO).
Vaccination numbers show that more than 1.6 billion vaccine doses have been administered around the world, the WHO data shows.
