Oil prices to be more volatile in 2017

Global oil prices will witness “much more volatility” in 2017, even though markets may rebalance in the first half of the year, if output cuts pledged by producers are implemented, the head of the International Energy Agency (IEA) has said.

Opec agreed, in November, to cut output by 1.2m barrels of oil per day (bpd) to 32.5m bpd for the first six months of 2017, in addition to 558,000 bpd of cuts agreed by independent producers, such as Russia, Oman, and Mexico.

“I would expect that we will see a rebalancing of the markets within the first half of this year,” said Fatih Birol, executive director of IEA, the Paris-based global energy watchdog.