Oil prices rose on Wednesday after a report of a decline in U.S. crude inventories and looming sanctions against Iran raised expectations of tightening supply, while top producer Russia warned of a fragile global market. <\/p>\n
U.S. West Texas Intermediate (WTI) crude futures were at $69.93 per barrel at 0646 GMT, up 68 cents, or 1 percent, from their last settlement. WTI futures gained 2.5 percent in the previous session. <\/p>\n
Brent crude futures climbed 30 cents, or 0.4 percent, to $79.36 a barrel. Brent has climbed for four straight sessions, gaining 2.2 percent the previous day.<\/p>\n
“Oil prices jumped overnight as American Petroleum Institute inventory data showed a large drawdown in inventories,” said William O’Loughlin of Australia’s Rivkin Securities.<\/p>\n
U.S. crude stocks fell by 8.6 million barrels in the week to Sept. 7 to 395.9 million, the American Petroleum Institute (API) said on Tuesday.<\/p>\n
Official data will be published by the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) on Wednesday.<\/p>\n
Outside the United States, traders have been focusing on the impact of U.S. sanctions against Iran that will target oil exports from November.<\/p>\n
Washington has put pressure on other governments to also cut imports, and many countries and companies are already falling in line and reducing purchases, triggering expectations of a tighter market.<\/p>\n
“The looming supply risks in the Middle East, particularly U.S. sanctions on Iran, should outweigh the concerns of oil demand growth slowdown from the emerging market crisis and China-U.S. trade tensions,” ANZ bank said on Wednesday.<\/p>\n
“FRAGILE” MARKET<\/p>\n
Russian energy minister Alexander Novak on Wednesday warned of the impact of U.S. sanctions against Iran.<\/p>\n
“This is huge uncertainty on the market – how the countries, which buy almost 2 million barrels per day of Iranian oil will act. The situation should be closely watched, the right decisions should be taken,” he said. <\/p>\n
Novak said global oil markets were “fragile” due to geopolitical risk and supply disruptions.<\/p>\n
“It is related to the fact that not all the countries have managed to restore their market and production,” he said, referring to outages and falling production in Mexico and Venezuela.<\/p>\n
Should markets overheat and prices spike, however, Novak said Russia could boost its output.<\/p>\n
“Russia has potential to raise production by 300,000 barrels (per day) mid-term, in addition to the level of October 2016,” he said.<\/p>\n
That month Russia produced 11.247 million bpd, a post-Soviet Union record-high.<\/p>\n
Oil markets were also eyeing Hurricane Florence offshore the United States amid surging demand for gasoline and diesel, although crude output will not be affected on the storm’s current route.<\/p>\n
The storm is expected to make landfall on the U.S. East Coast on Friday.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Oil prices rose on Wednesday after a report of a decline in U.S. crude inventories and looming sanctions against Iran raised expectations of tightening supply, while top producer Russia warned of a fragile global market. U.S. West Texas Intermediate (WTI) crude futures were at $69.93 per barrel at 0646 GMT, up 68 cents, or 1 percent, from their last settlement. WTI futures gained 2.5 percent in the previous session. Brent crude futures climbed 30 cents, or 0.4 percent, to $79.36 a barrel. Brent has climbed for four straight sessions, gaining 2.2 percent the previous day. “Oil prices jumped overnight as […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":39,"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-179767","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-oil-gas"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/179767","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\/39"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=179767"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/179767\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=179767"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=179767"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=179767"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}