While the oil market rebalancing looks fragile in the first quarter of 2021, global oil stocks are expected to rapidly draw down in the second half of this year as demand rises, setting the stage for OPEC+ to ease production cuts even if higher prices tempt producers from outside the group to boost output, the International Energy Agency (IEA) said on Thursday. This year, world oil demand is expected to grow by 5.4 million barrels per day (bpd) compared to 2020, the agency said in its closely-watched Oil Market Report for February. That’s 100,000 bpd lower than the projection in the January report when the IEA expected demand to rise by 5.5 million bpd year over year in 2021. The latest estimate from this month pegs total global oil demand reaching 96.4 million bpd, which would be recovering some 60 percent of the volume lost to the pandemic in […]