OPEC and its friends have just received some uncomfortable reading. The latest forecasts from the U.S. Energy Information Administration suggest that their agreements to boost prices and hasten the rebalancing of oil supply and demand by cutting output may bring the U.S. shale industry out of hibernation faster than they might like. The EIA’s monthly report published on Tuesday raised its forecast of global oil demand growth for 2017 to 1.63 million barrels a day from last month’s 1.56 million, its third successive increase — that should be good news for producers. At the same time, though, the EIA boosted its outlook for U.S. oil production. This is where the news gets bad for OPEC. Separate weekly EIA data published on Wednesday showed a 176,000 barrel-a-day jump in U.S. production from the previous week, the biggest increase since May 2015. A large part of that increase came from a […]