Brent Futures Sit $9 to $17 Above the EIA's 2027 Path, and Ethiopia Pays the Difference

The US Energy Information Administration's 2027 outlook puts Brent at an average of $73.74 a barrel, on the assumption that most Gulf production and trade return to pre-conflict averages by the second quarter. The futures market is not pricing that.

On 29 September at 12:30 UTC, November Brent traded at $103.91 and December at $96.41. Across the calendar comparisons cited by the Venture Capital channel, futures sit $9.67 to $11.84 above the EIA's path, with the gap widening to roughly $16 to $17 by the fourth quarter.

The $7.50 that is not a price fall

November Brent expired today. The $7.50 step down between the November and December contracts is a roll, not a discount: a service that switches contracts on expiry will display a lower number tomorrow without a barrel of oil having become cheaper. Anyone using a headline Brent figure to set a budget assumption needs to know which contract produced it.

The gap between futures and the EIA forecast is not, on its own, evidence that traders expect the agency to be wrong. Futures carry risk compensation, and a market pricing a wide distribution of outcomes will sit above the mean of a central forecast. But the size of the gap says something about how much weight the market puts on the EIA's normalisation assumption.

Why this lands on an Ethiopian desk

Ethiopia imports all of its refined fuel, and the state absorbs the difference between the import price and the domestic one. Addis Fortune reported this week that the recapitalisation of the Ethiopian Petroleum Supply Enterprise ran to 286 billion Br, against a subsidy cap of 20 billion Br — a measure of what the credit-financed import system had already cost before this year's Middle East disruption.

If the curve is closer to right than the forecast, the fiscal assumption behind that subsidy cap is built on the wrong number.

Open

The Venture Capital channel's figures are its own reading of the curve and are not sourced to an exchange settlement file. The EIA's 2027 outlook and its stated assumptions have not been reproduced here from the primary document.

Sources: Venture Capital, 30 September 2026, Addis Fortune, 30 September 2026