Low inventories reported today by the Energy Information Administration (EIA) did nothing to staunch the bleeding, with WTI getting gutted nearly 4% on the day, and Saudi rumors throwing another spanner in the works, while new U.S. economic data suggests more pain is in store for the sector.
The Trump administration appears not to be in a rush to close any trade deals with those eager for them. Reuters reported that no deals at all were signed during last week’s IMF-World Bank Spring Meetings, which saw world leaders gather in one place to discuss trade. This suggests extended tariff uncertainty, which means extended oil price uncertainty.
The U.S. stock markets enjoyed a broad rally on Wednesday, with the S&P 500 jumping nearly 2% a day after U.S. President Donald Trump announced that China tariffs will come down substantially, with another potential boost coming from a Wednesday Reuters report citing unnamed sources as saying talks to lead to significant tariff reductions.
Halliburton Co., the world’s largest provider of hydraulic fracturing services, fell sharply after warning investors that tariffs will impact a wide swath of the company’s business units.
The dominant North American oil field services provider told investors Tuesday on a conference call that tariffs will have an impact of 2 to 3 cents per share during the second quarter, with 60% of the hit affecting its completions-and-production unit, which houses the fracing business. The rest of the tariffs impact will be to its drilling and evaluation segment.
The Trump administration’s tariff regime, intended to boost US manufacturing and inflict punitive damage on Chinese manufacturing, has disrupted multiple industrial supply chains into the US with cascading effects across other regions. For the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region’s oilfield services (OFS) sector, the effects are indirect but may be significant if unmitigated by national oil companies (NOCs) and OFS suppliers.
President Trump’s tariff policies – which tanked oil prices and raised the odds of a recession – are undermining America’s petroleum trade surplus. That’s not a desirable outcome for an administration fixated on fixing trade deficits. Petroleum and energy trade, in fact, is one of the few sectors in which the U.S. has a large trade surplus in the dozens of billions of U.S. dollars annually.
Whether China will keep this rate of imports going forward is an open question, with U.S. exports of crude to the world’s top importer clearly set to get decimated if not outright sapped. For oil exporters, however, the more pressing issue is how long the tariff war will continue. Alas, this is also an open question at this part, although there is a chance of good news down the road. Until then, there will be some suffering, especially among the less wealthy oil exporters.
Over the long term, however, an effort to reduce the dependence on imports will pay off. Last week, China instituted export curbs on certain critical minerals like it did several years ago with Japan amid a trade dispute. In other words, China is no stranger to using its dominance in the sector as lever against trade partners with import dependence. China produces as much as 90% of the world’s rare earths output. This prompted a push by Western nations to diversify into their own rare earth supply chains but doing this has proven much trickier than talking about it.
Oil has dropped about $10 this month as the trade fight started by President Donald Trump stoked fears of a global recession that would hurt energy demand, especially in the US and China, the biggest crude consumers. Concerns about the growth outlook have led agencies to cut projections for oil usage and analysts to slash price forecasts, with the possibility of a glut amplified by OPEC+’s surprise decision to bring back output more quickly than expected.
At the time of writing, Brent crude was trading at just over $65 per barrel, with West Texas Intermediate at $61.71 per barrel, after on Friday the Trump administration announced a tariff exemption for certain electronics and semiconductors. Optimism wavered this week, however, as Washington launched investigations into pharmaceutical and semiconductor imports in what the media reported was part of setting the stage for tariffs on these two groups of products. President Trump himself said semiconductors were on the line for tariffs.