The Energy Information Administration released its September Short-Term Energy Outlook on Wednesday. The document says its forecast was completed on 3 September, and it describes a market that is tight but settling: Brent crude averaged $91 a barrel in August, should average around $90 through the second half of this year, and then ease back — to an average of $74 a barrel across 2027, $77 in the second quarter and $67 in the second half.
What the agency was reading is unusual. It records that crude oil production shut in worldwide averaged 6.7 million barrels a day in August, up from 5.0 million in July. Global oil inventories fell by an average of 3.9 million barrels a day in the second quarter, and the agency expects further draws of 3.0 million a day in the third quarter and 1.7 million in the fourth. Stocks are being run down rather than rebuilt, which is what keeps a price up when nothing else changes. On the cause, the outlook is careful and institutional: “We assume some constraints to exporting oil from the Middle East will persist through the end of the year,” the sentence begins, and it goes on to keep the region’s production below its pre-conflict average until the second quarter of 2027.
Six days separated the closing of that forecast from its publication, and the market moved inside the gap. On 9 September Brent touched $100.19 a barrel before easing to $99.93 by early afternoon in Karachi, Dawn reported; by Thursday morning in Australia it was trading at about US$101.75. It is not the first time this year — Brent was above $100 as recently as 24 July, and its high for the year was $126.41 on 30 April. For comparison, it averaged $69 a barrel across the whole of 2025.
Two things are worth holding apart. The daily price is a market quotation and moves on the day’s news. The EIA’s numbers are a monthly assessment of physical supply — barrels not produced, barrels drawn out of storage — and those move slowly. A forecast overtaken within a week is not necessarily a wrong forecast; it is a reminder that the two are measuring different things, and that the shorter of them is the noisier.
The agency’s own path still bends down. Whether it bends from $91 or from $101 is the question the October outlook will have to answer.