Oil Is Approaching $ 70 A Barrel

Oil prices jumped, on Wednesday, to a high level since two-and-a-half-year, approaching $ 70 a barrel for the first time, and the price of Brent crude, reaches on Wednesday, $ 67, after an explosion in Libya’s crude pipeline and OPEC-led voluntary supply cuts, as this price represents for the Algerian government, the price of financial balance, as it will not need to adopt austerity policy, tightening the belt, freezing projects and delaying others, by exceeding the threshold of seventy dollars.

Oil prices reach their highest level in the last 24 hours, and experts unanimously called them the highest level achieved in two and a half years, affected by the explosion of the Zaktout–Sadra line in Libya, and the voluntary reductions of supplies that are led by OPEC since the meeting in Algeria at the end of September 2016.

The price of a barrel of light oil reached, on Wednesday, over $ 59.72 in the exchange in Asia, while the barrel of European Brent benchmark oil reaches $ 66.71, and it realizes its highest level $ 67.02 per barrel, considering that the explosion of oil pipeline in the area of ​​Mourada South-west of Benghazi, led to a reduction of production of about 100.000 barrels per day, as the pipeline belongs to the oil company, which is pumping about 250.000 barrels per day from the fields of the south to the port of Sidra.

Figures and data at the table of the Finance Ministry confirm that the stability of the price of a barrel of oil reaches above $70, will stabilize Algeria’s revenues and may lift the ban on frozen projects such as the Metro and tramway projects in a number of provinces, the train and the construction of hospitals and a number of files that remained locked in drawers once the oil crisis worsened in the second half of 2014, and further exacerbated in 2015 and 2016, before the oil price stabilized after the meeting of oil producing and exporting countries in Algeria last year at $ 50 and exceeded in the second half of last year $ 60 and approaches $70 at the present period, which brings back hope of austerity measures such as freezing the import of more than 850 products starting from 2018.

For reference, the Saudi Oil Ministry announced that it is leading efforts to help the price of Brent barrel reach $ 75 in 2018.