Oil drops below $58 as IEA slashes demand forecast

Oil prices fell below $58 a barrel on Friday after the International Energy Agency lowered its forecast for global oil demand next year — the fourth time the number has been slashed in the last five months.

A barrel of West Texas Intermediate, the North American benchmark, was going for less than $58 a barrel. Brent Crude, the European and global benchmark, dipped below $63 for the first time since the recession.

As recently as this summer, WTI was going for more than $105 a barrel and Brent peaked at around $112.

In its monthly oil report, the agency said global oil demand in 2015 will grow by 900,000 barrels a day — 230,000 less than previously forecast — to 93.3 million.

"While demand growth is still expected to gain momentum in 2015 from 2014, the acceleration is now looking more modest than previously foreseen, in line with the ever-more tentative pace of the global economic recovery," the IEA said.

Exports should pick up oil slack, bank says

Oil usage fluctuates a little, but any way you slice it, the world is producing somewhere between one million and three million more barrels per day than it's using at the moment. Overproducing is a recipe for slumping prices, something that has been happening for three months or so, virtually without interruption.

The IEA said several years of record high prices have "induced the root cause" of the rout in oil prices in recent months — the surge in non-OPEC supply to its highest growth ever and a contraction in demand growth to five-year lows. The fall in oil prices gathered pace in late November when OPEC left its output target unchanged.

The agency also dampened expectations that the fall in oil prices would automatically be a boon for the global economy.

"The adverse impact of the oil price rout on oil-exporting economies looks likely to offset, if not exceed, the stimulus it could provide for oil-importing countries against a backdrop of weak economic growth and low inflation," the IEA said.

That's bad news for oil-producing nations like Canada.

But one of the country's largest banks on Friday struck an upbeat tone in its economic forecast, With Royal Bank noting that an increase in exports from industries outside oil should be enough to pick up the slack to keep Canada's economy strong — at least in terms of total GDP.