Oil prices in the range of $90-$100 per barrel may lead Saudi Arabia to taper its supply cuts, Gary Ross, CEO of Black Gold Investors and a veteran OPEC watcher, told an energy industry conference in Singapore on Monday.

Saudi Arabia is widely expected to roll over a voluntary oil cut of 1 million barrels per day for a fourth consecutive month into October.

“It’s inventory levels, supply, demand, and maybe the bottom line is inventory levels, and I think they want to see inventory levels getting down,” Ross said of the factors that would lead Saudi Arabia to begin paring back its output cuts.

Brent LCOc1 was trading above $88 on Monday.

Ross, speaking at the Asia Pacific Petroleum Conference (APPEC), also said he expects a “huge increase” in China’s oil demand in the fourth quarter of this year, powered by strong demand for jet fuel and gasoline.

“Chinese demand was very weak in the fourth quarter of 2022. It was down half a million barrels a day relative to the fourth quarter of 2021. So I expect a huge increase in demand in the fourth quarter of 2023,” he said.

“I think Chinese refinery runs are going to stay very, very high. Plus, they’ve been unrelenting in their purchase of SPR for the past couple of years, and I think that’s going to continue as well,” he said, referring to purchases for China’s strategic petroleum reserves.
Source: Reuters (Reporting by Florence Tan and Muyu Xu; Writing by Tony Munroe; Editing by Jacqueline Wong and Tom Hogue)