Oil prices were steady on Monday as support from OPEC-led supply restraint was countered by an uptick in U.S. drilling and concerns about demand due to the slow progress in U.S.-Chinese trade talks.<\/p>\n
Benchmark Brent oil was little changed, up 3 cents at $62.13 a barrel at 0945 GMT. U.S. West Texas Intermediate (WTI) crude slipped 27 cent to $52.45.<\/p>\n
“Oil prices are still trying to figure out what lead to follow. On the one hand, there is the OPEC+ cut story, now coupled with increasing issues around Venezuelan supply”, Vienna-based consultancy JBC Energy said.<\/p>\n
“At the same time, it has to be argued that a lot of the economic data that has been released over the last few days has really not been too encouraging, and U.S.-Chinese trade talks are also seemingly not progressing very fast.”<\/p>\n
Energy firms in the United States last week increased the number of oil rigs operating for the second time in three weeks, a weekly report by Baker Hughes said on Friday.<\/p>\n
Companies added seven oil rigs in the week to Feb. 8, bringing the total to 854, pointing to a further rise in U.S. crude production, which already stands at a record 11.9 million bpd.<\/p>\n
WTI prices were also weighed down by the closure of a 120,000-barrels-per-day (bpd) crude distillation unit (CDU) at Phillips 66’s Wood River, Illinois, refinery following a fire on Sunday.<\/p>\n
The Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries and its allies, including Russia, a group known as OPEC+, have reined in output to prevent a supply glut.<\/p>\n
The deal, effective from January, aims to cut 1.2 million bpd until the end of June, in a move producers and many analysts expect to help balance supply and demand in 2019.<\/p>\n
OPEC and its allies meet on April 17 and 18 in Vienna to review the agreement.<\/p>\n
U.S. sanctions on Venezuela, along with older sanctions on fellow OPEC member Iran, have also prevented crude prices from falling further.<\/p>\n
But economic concerns still weigh on crude prices.<\/p>\n
Trade talks between Washington and Beijing resume this week with a delegation of U.S. officials travelling to China for the next round of negotiations. The United States has threatened to increase tariffs already imposed on goods from China on March 1 if the trade talks do not produce an agreement.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Oil prices were steady on Monday as support from OPEC-led supply restraint was countered by an uptick in U.S. drilling and concerns about demand due to the slow progress in U.S.-Chinese trade talks. Benchmark Brent oil was little changed, up 3 cents at $62.13 a barrel at 0945 GMT. U.S. West Texas Intermediate (WTI) crude slipped 27 cent to $52.45. “Oil prices are still trying to figure out what lead to follow. On the one hand, there is the OPEC+ cut story, now coupled with increasing issues around Venezuelan supply”, Vienna-based consultancy JBC Energy said. “At the same time, it […]<\/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-232439","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-oil-gas"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/232439","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=232439"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/232439\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=232439"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=232439"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=232439"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}