Market watch: June

Production outages, Opec's meeting, and perhaps a new era of US gas exports

PRODUCTION outages have mounted and as sentiment in the market begins to turn, investors will be focused on further supply-side disruptions in the coming month. Geopolitics and disasters have already cut about 0.6m barrels a day from April’s supply. Across Opec, 2.2m b/d is now offline – most of this (like Libyan oil) has been missing for months, and is therefore priced in. But Nigeria’s production losses have almost doubled in recent weeks, to 0.65m b/d. It’s an unexpected source of a market tightening that seems to be accelerating. Opec’s meeting in Vienna will trouble the market less. The group is not expected to agree on any output measures, even though its output soared to a seven-year