Brent oil price fell below 55 dollars a barrel, a new low last registered in May 2009, due to increasing production in Russia and Iraq and concerns about excess oil on the market, transmit Bloomberg, quoted by Mediafax. US WTI crude position the price of oil close to 50 dollars per barrel.

Brent oil price fell by 48% in 2014, the largest decline since the financial crisis from 2008 to present days. The price of Brent crude with delivery in February fell to 53.53 dollars a barrel on the London Stock Exchange, the lowest level recorded in May 2009. The price of West Texas Intermediate (WTI) with delivery in February fell to 50.42 dollars per barrel, in New York.

In last December, Russia had a record production of 10.667 million barrels of oil per day (bpd), the highest level since the dissolution of the USSR. In 2014, average oil production in Russia rose by 0.7% from 2013 to 10.58 million bpd.

Also, the Ministry of Oil in Iraq announced that it wants to increase oil exports in January to a high of 3.3 million bpd. In December, Iraq exported 2.94 million bpd, the highest level in over 30 years. The government in Baghdad has signed an agreement with the Kurdish region to allow the transit of more than 500,000 bpd to Turkey.

Production in Libya declined to less than 300,000 bpd after a series of clashes with Islamist militants by authorities, who cut out the production facilities and reduced access to export terminals

Morgan Stanley: oil supply is increasing

The surplus brought, among others, by records from Russia and Iraq, will put further pressure on prices, which halved last year, says US investment bank Morgan Stanley. Along with ordinary producers who break record after record (USA, Canada, Iraq, and Russia), countries in West Africa and Latin America will produce more boe, say the analysts of the US bank. Iran could increase supplies by about 500,000 bpd if Western sanctions are lifted, the report said.

Analysts at Morgan Stanley are not optimistic for the next period. “It is difficult to anticipate an improvement in oil market fundamentals in the near future. There were already a number of worrying signs,” they say.