Oil futures fell in Asian trade on Wednesday after industry data pointed to a potential ninth straight week of inventory builds, renewing concerns about an oversupply of oil despite output curbs by OPEC and non-OPEC members.<\/p>\n
As of 0740 GMT, brent futures were down 23 cents, or 0.4 percent, at $55.69, after settling down 0.2 percent in the previous session.<\/p>\n
U.S. West Texas Intermediate (WTI) crude fell 29 cents, or 0.6 percent, to $52.85 a barrel, after ending the previous session down 0.1 percent.<\/p>\n
“Oil is range-bound. If prices dip below $50 a barrel, OPEC will cut more; if it goes above $55 the U.S. will produce more,” said Jonathan Barratt, chief investment officer at Ayers Alliance in Sydney.<\/p>\n
U.S. crude stocks rose by 11.6 million barrels last week, more than five times analysts’ estimates, according to industry group, the American Petroleum Institute. <\/p>\n
If the figures are confirmed later on Wednesday by official data from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Energy Information Administration (EIA) it would be the ninth straight week of inventory builds. <\/p>\n
Analysts have forecast a 1.7 million barrel inventory build.<\/p>\n
“All eyes are on the EIA numbers,” said Jeffrey Halley, senior market strategist at Oanda in Singapore. “A big washout of that will see oil test technical support levels.”<\/p>\n
Oil prices are facing headwinds from a likely U.S. Fed interest rate hike next week, a strong dollar, increasing inventory builds to record levels and rising U.S. shale oil production, he said. <\/p>\n
“The planets seem to be aligning for a bit of a washout of long positions. I think it’s getting time for a bit of a correction in oil prices,” Halley said.<\/p>\n
The API stocks data came as the EIA on Tuesday cut its 2017 world oil demand growth forecast by 110,000 barrels per day to 1.51 million bpd.<\/p>\n
At the same time, members of an OPEC-led production agreement said on Tuesday total output reductions are more than 1.5 million barrels per day and are meeting their expectations.<\/p>\n
China demand remains strong, with crude oil imports hitting the second-highest level on record in February on a daily basis at about 8.286 million barrels per day, up 3.5 percent on a year ago, customs data showed on Wednesday.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Oil futures fell in Asian trade on Wednesday after industry data pointed to a potential ninth straight week of inventory builds, renewing concerns about an oversupply of oil despite output curbs by OPEC and non-OPEC members. As of 0740 GMT, brent futures were down 23 cents, or 0.4 percent, at $55.69, after settling down 0.2 percent in the previous session. U.S. West Texas Intermediate (WTI) crude fell 29 cents, or 0.6 percent, to $52.85 a barrel, after ending the previous session down 0.1 percent. “Oil is range-bound. If prices dip below $50 a barrel, OPEC will cut more; if it […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[133],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-103242","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-oil-gas"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/103242","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=103242"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/103242\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=103242"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=103242"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=103242"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}