Key investment points:
Global economic growth is expected to decline, and crude oil demand is expected to decline slightly, but it still exceeds the average daily demand in 2019. In 2022, the global economic growth is expected to decrease by 0.4 percentage points to 3.5%, and the global crude oil demand will be reduced by 340000 barrels per day to 100.39 million barrels per day, but this value exceeds 100.2 million barrels per day in 2019 before the epidemic. The average daily demand of OECD Europe, America and Asia Pacific region increased year-on-year in 2022, and the self-sufficiency rate of Asia Pacific and Europe region is low, which is heavily dependent on crude oil import. The demand of non OECD countries increased year-on-year in 2022, among which the demand of China and India increased, and the demand growth of India accelerated, and both of them were heavily dependent on imports.
The net energy demand of the National Treasury has been kept at a low level for many years, and the passive destocking is still in progress. According to the OECD inventory, whether it is crude oil or petroleum products, the commercial inventory in the OECD region in 2022 decreased significantly compared with the average value of the previous five years, which indirectly confirms the judgment of the current tight balance of overall production and sales. In addition, at present, the crude oil is at a high price for a long time. Although many countries hope to put SPR (strategic reserve) to curb the rise of oil prices, the effect is limited, and the inventory continues to be passively removed. The conflict between Russia and Ukraine has added too much uncertainty to the normal global crude oil supply system. Energy substitution is not achieved overnight. Local shortages and lengthened supply chains have increased transportation and friction costs for the supply of crude oil.
Global supply growth is difficult to increase in large quantities in the short term, and the overall acceleration of E & P in the Americas is obvious. Although the supply and demand of crude oil is expected to rebalance, it will take a long time. After the supply was significantly higher than the demand in 2020, the demand for crude oil has continued to exceed the supply since 2021. The supply of major consumer regions has increased, but the growth rate is lower than that of demand. Under this background, the number of crude oil wells has continued to increase, and the prosperity of oil services has increased simultaneously. However, the current number of drilling wells is still significantly lower than that in 2019, and some shale oil enterprises are facing capital expenditure constraints and the need to improve their own capital balance sheet, so it is difficult to increase the volume in the short term. At present, OPEC has a strong capacity for large-scale production. However, as the beneficiary of the rise in crude oil prices, it has no initiative to significantly increase production unless it faces strong diplomatic pressure. It can not solve the tension between supply and demand by increasing production in a small amount in the short term. The long-term rebalancing expectation is directly reflected in the long-term discount of oil price. However, we believe that rebalancing will not come so soon.
We suggest paying attention to upstream energy and oil service companies with low valuation level and good performance flexibility.
Risk tip: the crude oil price fluctuates violently, the demand for petrochemical products is less than expected, and the safety production risk.
