Oil Prices Surge Over Trade Optimism

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Oil prices have moved higher this week on hopes of new trade deals.

There is hope this week that the U.S. and China might come to a trade agreement after a deal was announced with the UK, OilPrices.com reports.

ICE Brent futures have recovered to $64 per barrel as oil markets keep their hopes high for the upcoming first round of US-China trade talks this weekend. Should US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent reach some sort of breakthrough with his Chinese counterpart, May could recoup most of April’s losses.

The US Department of the Treasury imposed sanctions on the Hebei Xinhai Chemical Group refinery and three companies operating the Dongying port in Shandong province, arguing they had facilitated the delivery of Iranian crude oil over the past years.

Releasing its Global Methane Tracker 2025 report, the International Energy Agency warned that the energy sector emitted 145 million tonnes of methane last year, adding that at least 35 million tonnes could be cut at no net cost, if oil companies took heed.

As Chinese President Xi Jinping visited Moscow this week, the Kremlin pitched the idea of Chinese companies investing into its mulled 13 mtpa Baltic LNG project in Ust Luga, concurrently seeking to expedite talks on the stalled Power of Siberia-2 pipeline.

Mexico’s state oil company Pemex reported two separate leaks in a pipeline connecting the offshore Akal-C platform with the Dos Bocas maritime terminal in the southern state of Tabasco, with oil slicks reported along a 5-mile stretch of the shoreline.

Aster Chemicals, the JV of global trading major Glencore (LON:GLEN) and Indonesian petrochemical company Chandra Asri, agreed to buy Chevron’s polyethylene-producing plant in Singapore, less than a month after it bought Shell’s Bukom refinery.

Norway’s parliament ordered its government to launch a new oil exploration licensing round that would include frontier parts such as the eastern part of the Barents Sea in the Arctic, as gas production is expected to fall sharply after 2030.

Returning to pre-COVID levels for the first time in 5 years, the EIA reported that US jet fuel demand surpassed 2 million b/d in the week ended May 2, for the first time since December 2019 after a robust 474,000 b/d week-on-week increase.

In defiance of tightening US sanctions, Venezuela’s state oil firm PDVSA restarted the 310,000 b/d capacity Cardon refinery after a year-long halt that was triggered by a power failure and subsequent lack of equipment, seeking to ramp up gasoline production in the country.

The European Commission has yielded to intense lobbying from Europe’s car manufacturers and extended the timeline to meet new CO2 emission targets by 2027 rather than just this year, defined as 93.6 CO2/km for passenger cars and 153.9 CO2/km for vans.

Having failed to find any commercial volumes of oil in the offshore zone of the Caspian Sea so far, Iran’s Oil Ministry is now looking to renew exploratory drilling in its shallow water part, drilling the Rudsar wildcat after a 28-year drilling hiatus.

According to energy consultancy Enverus, oil and gas permit applications in Texas fell to their lowest since February 2021 this past April, dipping 30% month-over-month to 570 applications after Q1 2025 hovered around 800 applications per month.

Brazil’s state oil firm Petrobras (NYSE:PBR) announced the discovery of a high-quality oil reservoir in the Aram block of the offshore Santos Basin, with its wildcat drilled to a water depth of 1,952 metres and potentially expanding the scope of its pre-salt ambition.

China’s soybean imports collapsed to their lowest since at least 2015 when Beijing’s statistical agency started to track them, amidst halted US imports and loading delays in Brazil, with inflows totalling only 6.1 million metric tonnes, a 30% drop from March levels.