Gasoline prices, price war | Pump prices reach NOK 17: – Local price war

(The newspaper online) During the week, many places in the country saw the pump price fall by around NOK 17 per litre.

This is confirmed by Nettavisen’s fuel application. The app relies on users entering the price, and other users checking the same price at the pumps.

A liter of diesel in Trondheim cost NOK 17.09 on November 29, says Sever Urhaugen. In the vicinity of Trondheim on the same day, the price of a liter of gasoline was 16.89 Norwegian kroner.

– The local price war is the most important reason why we see terminal prices below NOK 20 in many places, explains Knut Hjalmar Hansen, Communications Director at Circle K to Nettavisen.

On Friday morning, pump prices rose back above the 20s in eastern Norway.

Impact of oil prices

Fuel prices in Norway are primarily affected by the price of oil, refinery margins, currency effects and the local pricing strategy of different gas station chains.

This week, meetings were held in the OPEC+ oil group. The meetings were postponed from last week. According to data from Infront, oil prices rose on Wednesday and Thursday in anticipation of news from the oil pool.

Thursday More information from gradually known meetings. From around 4:15 p.m., oil prices began to decline.

Oil prices fell four dollars on Friday morning from the peak levels recorded on Thursday.

The oil group announced other voluntary cuts of 2.2 million barrels per day for the first quarter of next year.

According to DNB Markets and Helgi analyst Andre Martinsen, the reduction looks impressive at first glance. However, the complexity of OPEC+ calculations has left investors in a state of uncertainty.

– The voluntary reduction in production will have a much less impact on the actual production level in the oil group.

After a deep dive into the calculations, Martinsen expects that the production cuts announced by OPEC+ will reduce production by 380,000 barrels per day below the level on October 23.

– This is the reason for the market’s disappointment yesterday, and the price of oil declined after the OPEC announcement.

Energy analyst Thena Saltvedt at Nordea Markets explains that OPEC+ likely wants to raise oil prices to around $90 per barrel, as countries like Saudi Arabia need an oil price of around $85 per barrel to balance their national budgets.

Climate Summit

The COP28 climate negotiations meeting is scheduled to be held in Dubai until December 12.

– It will be very interesting to see whether COP28 succeeds and whether climate negotiators will now deliver on ambitious binding emissions reduction plans. As I see it, the meeting will be successful if we can come up with a joint plan to phase out fossil fuels within an ambitious timetable, says Saltvedt.

She adds that investments in renewable energy must also triple over the same timeline in order to reach the target.

Such an ambitious agreement will send clear signals to oil producers and may also be able to influence the price of oil.

The analyst further explains that if you look at the development of the price of crude oil, which is an important driver of the development of the price of gasoline, you will find that it has fallen from more than $96 per barrel.

The krone exchange rate has also risen somewhat against the dollar and the euro since the beginning of November.

This should not mean that currency effects particularly contributed to raising gasoline prices.