Crude oil price on the Brent crude benchmark is trading flat, as concerns over India’s coronavirus situation counteracts the initial surge of price after a cyberattack on a US fuel pipeline.
Crude oil price had initially flown off in early Monday trading after a cyberattack forced a US major oil pipeline run by Colonial Pipeline to shut down. Colonial Pipeline said its main fuel lines remained down, even though more minor connections between delivery areas worked. The impact of this event is expected to be limited, as the pipelines could become fully operational within the week.
However, India’s new coronavirus cases and associated deaths remained near record highs on Monday. These quickly erased any bullish impact of the cyberattack on crude oil prices. This is exerting demand concerns from the world’s 3rd largest crude oil importer. Compounding the situation is the expected kick-in of the relaxed production curbs from OPEC +. The alliance’s production curbs have been mainly responsible for recovering crude oil prices after the WTI contract collapsed into negative territory in April 2020.
Brent crude is challenging support at the 67.74 price mark. This support has stayed intact for three days in a row. However, the intraday violations of this price level are getting progressively deeper, indicating mounting bearish pressure on this support level. A breakdown of this price mark opens the door towards the 66.81 and 65.95 support targets. At the latter point, the price will aim to break down the flag to achieve a measured move towards 57.47. This move needs bears to take out the 64.26, 62.21, and 60.07 price levels along the way.
On the other hand, bulls need a support bounce to take crude oil price towards the 70.01 resistance to achieve a break that opens the door towards 71.44 or even 73.34, respectively.
