Goldman Slashes Oil Price Forecast as Demand Outlook Dims

Goldman Sachs cut its oil price forecast for 2025 by 5.5% for Brent crude and by 4.3% for West Texas Intermediate citing OPEC+ decision to bring more production back in May and the tariff barrage that President Trump unleashed this week, which the bank expects will cause a global recession.

The bank’s analysts now expect Brent crude to average $69 per barrel this year and WTI to average $66 per barrel. The benchmarks have been trading around these levels earlier today.

Goldman did not stop there, however, expecting the doom and gloom to persist into 2026 as well. The bank also revised its 2026 Brent crude forecast by 9% to $62 per barrel and its 2026 WTI forecast by 6.3% to $59 per barrel.

“The risks to our reduced oil price forecast are to the downside, especially for 2026, given growing risks of recession and to a lesser extent of higher OPEC+ supply,” Goldman analysts wrote in a note, cited by Reuters.

The OPEC+ countries that have been cutting their oil production for more than a year to keep prices above a certain acceptable minimum decided on Thursday to continue easing the reductions by adding 411,000 barrels per day to their combined supply from May. The move came as a surprise to traders and analysts, who had expected a much smaller boost of 135,000 barrels daily.

Instead, the eight OPEC+ countries that have been withholding production – Saudi Arabia, Russia, Iraq, UAE, Kuwait, Kazakhstan, Algeria, and Oman – decided to bundle three monthly increases in output in the May production levels, which put additional pressure on prices.

In light of these latest developments, Goldman Sachs’ analysts have revised their oil demand projections for 2025 to 600,000 bpd from 900,000 bpd. For 2026, they project global oil demand growth of 700,000 barrels daily.