Brent ended up 1.19% at $87.51 and WTI ended up 1.92% at $85.43. Both prices had peaked in session since 2014.
Oil prices closed Tuesday near 7-year highs reached earlier, as an attack on an oil patch in Abu Dhabi further strained an already tense market.
The barrel of Brent from the North Sea for delivery in March, the most traded contract in London, gained 1.19%, to end at 87.51 dollars. In session, it had climbed to 88.13 dollars, for the first time since October 14, 2014.
In New York, the barrel of West Texas Intermediate (WTI), due in February, took him 1.92% to settle at 85.43 dollars. Earlier, it listed at $85.74, a first since October 13, 2014.
The concern about the deterioration of the situation between Ukraine and Russia, present for several days, “has been overtaken by the attack on the installations of the United Arab Emirates”, explained Michael Lynch, president of the firm Strategic Energy & Economic Research. (SEER).
Monday, an attack probably committed by drones according to the first elements of the investigation, blew up three tank trucks near the tanks of ADNOC, the oil company of Abu Dhabi.
Claimed by the Houthi rebels in Yemen, this strike killed three people and injured six, without damaging the emirate’s oil installations.
Michael Lynch underlined that the precedents of successful attacks on oil infrastructures in the Middle East were very rare, which partly explains the reaction of the operators.
“And that introduces the possibility of seeing production losses at a time when the market is already very tight,” continued the analyst.
For Louise Dickson, an analyst at Rystad Energy, the widening of the civil war in Yemen “could signal that a new Iranian nuclear agreement is no longer on the cards in the near future, which would deprive the market of Iranian barrels,” she wrote in a note.
The Houthi rebels are, indeed, close to Iran, a regional heavyweight.
As the market worries about supply, the Organization of Petroleum Producing Countries (OPEC) on Tuesday maintained its forecast for a rise in global demand for black gold in 2022, which would cross 100 million barrels per day ( 100.8), overriding the effects of the Omicron variant of the coronavirus.
On Tuesday, $90 calls were the most sought after in the WTI futures market, evidence that the market is gearing up to go higher.
In a note sent to its clients on Monday, the bank Goldman Sachs had forecast a passage of Brent above 100 dollars this year.
However, Michael Lynch believes that “we are approaching a peak. We are going to enter the period when demand is traditionally weak and it seems that supply is going up, overall, even if it is not as quickly as people would like.