Brent Oil Holding Above $102 with Asia Absorbing Glut

Brent crude’s biggest price-rout in more than a year is coming to an end as the flow of West African crude to Asia helps disperse a glut, banks including Societe Generale SA (GLE), BNP Paribas SA (BNP) and DNB ASA (DNB) said.

A “price floor is forming” close to $100 a barrel for Brent, used to value more than half the world’s oil, as the surplus of Nigerian supplies is whittled away, Societe Generale said in a report today. The incentive for sending cargoes from the region to buyers in Asia is at its strongest in four years, data from PVM Oil Associates Ltd. show. Chinese and Indian refiners bolstered purchases of West African crude to the highest in at least three years, a Bloomberg News survey of traders indicates.

“We might be around the bottom for this price cycle,” Torbjoern Kjus, an analyst at DNB in Oslo, said by phone today. “Nigerian barrels moving to Asia again, to me that’s the first sign that the market’s starting to re-balance.”

Bloomberg

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