Crude oil settles above $80/barrel, U.S. likely to press OPEC on supply

Yahoo Finance’s Jared Blikre discusses how energy markets closed today and the recent rally in oil.

Video Transcript

KARINA MITCHELL: Welcome back to Yahoo Finance. Well, the energy sector losing some steam today. That as oil slips, trimming the big gains that we've seen over the last couple of sessions. Here with how oil settled is our Yahoo Finance's Jared Blikre. Fuel demand taking a bit of a hit today.

JARED BLIKRE: Yes, I'm looking at the settlement price here for February futures, $82.12 per barrel. And it looks like we're still trading in the electronic market as usual. Here's the intraday price action. Got green a couple of times, but wasn't quite able to make it. Notably, still holding above $80 per barrel. And we've seen a lot of strength recently, notwithstanding today. Here is that low in December, and it's been up, up, up just about ever since.

And you take a look at some of the fundamentals here. A note by RBC just caught my eye. They're saying that the US is likely to press OPEC and OPEC+ to make up for some of the supply losses that have been having-- that Nigeria, Angola, and others have been facing. And also they're saying that the US is likely to increase the SPR allotment that's going to be drained off as part of the next, I guess, run at the energy market. So with rising energy prices probably putting pressure on OPEC here, that would be the Biden administration and also a possible Strategic Petroleum Reserve release, in addition to the 40 million barrels that were released before. I believe that effort is still ongoing.

So I want to get a check of the energy market heat map here. We do see a lot of green today. Energy is not the greatest outperforming sector, but still up about 3/10 of a percent. And let's just check out how the energy sector has been doing these nine days into the new year. We see Exxon up now 16%, Royal Dutch Shell up 14%, ConocoPhillips up 16%, and BP up 18%. So the number one sector last year, up over 45%, up considerably this year as well.

KARINA MITCHELL: OK, Jared Blikre, thank you so much for that repo--