Oil prices fell on Thursday, pulled down as a firmer dollar outweighed a report of a decrease in US crude inventories. <\/p>\n
US West Texas Intermediate (WTI) crude futures were at $61.15 a barrel at 0748 GMT, down 53 cents, or 0.9 percent, from their last settlement.<\/p>\n
Brent crude futures fell 48 cents, or 0.7 percent, from their last close to $64.94 per barrel. <\/p>\n
The dollar rose to a one-week high against a basket of major currencies on Thursday, after minutes of the Federal Reserve’s January meeting showed policymakers were more confident of the need to keep raising interest rates.<\/p>\n
“The firming dollar continues to thwart investor sentiment despite the bullish inventory data,” said Stephen Innes, head of trading for Asia-Pacific at futures brokerage OANDA.<\/p>\n
Since oil trading is conducted in dollars, a rise in the greenback makes fuel imports for countries using other currencies domestically more expensive, potentially curbing demand.<\/p>\n
The firm dollar outweighed a reported fall in US crude inventories.<\/p>\n
The American Petroleum Institute on Wednesday reported an unexpected drop in US crude oil inventories by 907,000 barrels to 420.3 million barrels for the week to Feb. 16.<\/p>\n
“Improved pipeline infrastructure to the Gulf coast and the decreased supply via TransCanada’s Keystone pipeline, sent … inventories tumbling,” Innes said.<\/p>\n
Despite Thursday’s falls, analysts said oil markets were generally well supported due to demand-growth coinciding with production restraint led by the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) and Russia.<\/p>\n
“OPEC production curbs have stabilised the market. Adherence to (the) agreement has been relatively good,” Daniel Hynes, senior commodity strategist at ANZ bank, said in a report published on Thursday.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Oil prices fell on Thursday, pulled down as a firmer dollar outweighed a report of a decrease in US crude inventories. US West Texas Intermediate (WTI) crude futures were at $61.15 a barrel at 0748 GMT, down 53 cents, or 0.9 percent, from their last settlement. Brent crude futures fell 48 cents, or 0.7 percent, from their last close to $64.94 per barrel. The dollar rose to a one-week high against a basket of major currencies on Thursday, after minutes of the Federal Reserve’s January meeting showed policymakers were more confident of the need to keep raising interest rates. “The […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":44,"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-150402","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-oil-gas"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/150402","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\/44"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=150402"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/150402\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=150402"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=150402"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=150402"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}