Covid-19 report, 10th edition. Global outbreak overview and its impact on the energy sector.

Since the coronavirus outbreak, Rystad energy publishes a report about the impact of the virus on the energy sector, especially on oil. This report is regularly updated and can be found on their website, on their dedicated covid-19 page. Those information are also available in their press releases.

Here, you can download the 10th edition of this report in pdf, published 14 May 2020.

Executive summary.

In this edition of the Covid-19 report we ask the broad question; Can societies return to near normal activity without being hit by a new wave of coronavirus outbreak? In more technical language, can the effective reproduction number be kept below 1 while societies return to pre-Covid-19 social and economic activity levels – before a vaccine is in place? Our Effective Prevention scenario, as laid out in the second part of this report, illustrates what a “yes” answer to these questions would look like.

As a part of our analyses, we have correlated Google mobility data with empirical reproduction numbers on a country by country basis. This offers insight into a few key findings, namely that certain levels of reduced activity at transit and recreational places will be required to achieve specific Reff values. We also demonstrate that a handful of countries have significantly fewer people in the most infectious phase of the virus as of today, versus in March. Thus, reopening seems possible in these countries, while other nations are still far away from being able to reopen in a responsible manner.

Still, reopening appears imminent in many countries and new waves of coronavirus outbreak are likely to come, requiring further mitigation. This leads to what we call the Mitigation scenario. In the section discussing the impact of the pandemic on the oil market, we describe how oil demand recovery will unfold differently under these two scenarios, the Effective Prevention scenario and the Mitigation scenario. In the Effective Prevention scenario, we see 6 million barrels per day of oil demand returning every month for the next few months, driven by a comeback of road traffic.