Sevens Report Co-Editor Quoted in MarketWatch

For now, oil prices have found support from unrest in Iran, and from Israeli threats of potential military strikes on Iranian oil infrastructure, which would impact supplies, said Tyler Richey, co-editor at Sevens Report Research.

Venezuela continues to be in the spotlight, and the near-term impact of the situation there is actually also bullish for prices from a supply standpoint, Richey told MarketWatch.

The state-owned Petróleos de Venezuela, or PDVSA, has reportedly shut down an unknown amount of oil-well production due to a lack of sufficient physical oil storage and still largely locked-down port operations, he said.

That eventually could pressure prices lower, as Venezuela has nowhere to put the barrels still flowing out of the ground — leaving it in a very similar debacle to that which the U.S. found itself in back in April 2020, when storage hit capacity and some operators were forced to pay someone to take delivery of their oil, Richey noted. That might be an area where President Trump may want U.S. oil companies to step in with help.

That’s an amount of oil that will no longer be going to China or Russia — and the demand for those barrels hasn’t changed overnight, so they will need to be sourced elsewhere, “temporarily tightening global physical-market dynamics,” said Richey.