The marker price for the Oman Crude Oil Futures Contract slid $2.50 per barrel to settle at $55.38 on the Dubai Mercantile Exchange (DME) on Monday for April 2020 deliveries. The protracted slide, which began nearly two weeks ago when news of the novel coronavirus outbreak first broke, has lopped nearly $10 from the price of the Omani crude benchmark.
On Thursday, the Oman Crude Oil Futures Contract lost a steep $3.74 per barrel, coinciding with the labelling of the pandemic as a public health emergency by the World Health Organization (WHO).
Slumping crude demand in China, where the outbreak began last month in Wuhan in Hubei province, has weighed on global oil prices with benchmark products like West Texas Crude and Brent crude both down by about 18 per cent over the past month.
Opec and its allies are considering emergency measures to help arrest the decline with heavyweight Saudi Arabia pushing to bring forward a meeting of the cartel as prices tumble to a six-month low. Russia, which had initially pushed back at the request, is now willing to hold the early meeting but Moscow said it wanted to keep monitoring the situation, Interfax news agency reported.
Opec is said to be considering a proposal to deepen current production curbs by about 500,000 barrels a day, though there’s no consensus on the idea yet, say market experts. There is scepticism that the proposal will receive the required backing at the 23-nation coalition known as Opec+ have already made steep cutbacks.
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