42 Quotes by Gerard Burg

While we continue to assess the damage from Katrina, the threat to production of new storms is attracting everybody's attention and could drive prices right back up.

With refineries ramping up at maximum capacity and with the weather having been warmer than usual over the past two weeks, the build was not that much of a surprise.

Copper is often perceived to be the barometer for market conditions and therefore a significant fall in copper prices could remove speculative support from other metals.

Crude inventories went in the opposite direction to the consensus view among analysts. That's taken crude oil up a little higher.

These concerns also led to a reduction in speculative long positions in the futures market, resulting in less speculative support for spot prices.

Prices are expected to ease in 2007 as expanding refinery capacity reduces some of the bottleneck in that sector. However, the likely strength of oil demand, as well as the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries' intention to support higher prices will maintain crude oil prices at historically high levels.

You've got to wonder, where would it go? There's no spare refining capacity to refine it and we're starting to run out of places to store it. Crude stocks are swelled and there's little demand for that additional supply.

This is really much more important than OPEC supply as their spare capacity is largely heavy and sour and the real shortage is capacity to upgrade such fuels anyway.

At least for the short term this has removed some of the concerns that we might see, first of all, some sanctions imposed and then a cut in output as a response. The situation is unresolved and this still leaves the potential for further events to influence prices.