The oil market has lived in interesting times for so long it could do with a weekend off. This one wasn’t it. Ukraine dominated headlines, but in terms of oil output it is an irrelevance. Libya and Venezuela loom much larger. It wasn’t meant to be like this. Coming into 2014, the International Energy Agency was projecting oil supply outside of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries to rise by 1.7 million barrels a day against global demand growth of 1.3 million a day. That excess should have meant rising inventories and spare OPEC capacity, pushing down prices. Instead, after initial weakness, Brent crude is back above $110 a barrel. The impetus for this has come not from riots in Caracas or even rising demand from emerging markets. Rather, demand for oil in the industrialized world increased, bucking the trend of recent years. That was partly due to […]