The Dec’25 Brent futures contract initially dipped this afternoon, reaching $65.85/bbl at 15:40 BST before finding support and rising to $66.52/bbl at 17:00 BST (time of writing). In the news, Russian Deputy Prime Minister Alexander Novak stated that Russia has been slowly increasing its oil production, reaching 9.17mb/d, and was close to meeting OPEC+ output quota of 9.4mb/d in September. In his statement, Novak expressed that further diesel and domestic oil refinery restrictions were no longer needed, citing that supply and demand were balanced. Elsewhere, the US has postponed its sanctions on the Russian-owned Serbia NIS oil refinery by one week. According to Reuters, the extension comes as Croatian oil pipeline operator JANAF was given a license by the US to complete contracted volumes of crude to Serbia. In Belgium, the Port of Antwerp-Bruges has been heavily disrupted by Flemish pilots protesting federal pension reforms. In other news, Bloomberg has reported that a US government report showed a decline of around 763kb in domestic stockpiles. Finally, at time of writing, the front month Dec/Jan’26 and 6-month Dec/Jun’26 spreads are at $0.56/bbl and $1.16/bbl, respectively.
