Oil prices are rising Thursday morning, recovering from a moderate decline the day before, triggered by data on a sharp increase in U.S. oil inventories last week.
The price of April futures on London’s ICE Futures Exchange stood at $85.85 per barrel by 7:05 a.m., $0.47 (0.55%) above the previous session’s closing price. Those contracts fell by $0.2 (0.2%) to $85.38 per barrel at the close of trading on Wednesday.
The price of WTI futures for March at electronic trades of the New York Mercantile Exchange (NYMEX) is $79.16 per barrel by that time, which is $0.57 (0.73%) above the final value of the previous session. The previous day the contract fell by $0.47 (0.6%) to $78.59 per barrel.
According to the report of U.S. Department of Energy published on Wednesday, oil reserves in the country last week jumped by 16.28 million barrels. Gasoline inventories declined by 2.32 million barrels and distillates by 1.28 million barrels.
Experts expected an increase of oil reserves by 2 million barrels, gasoline reserves by 1.5 million barrels and distillates by 1 million barrels.
At the same time, the Energy Department explained that the data on oil reserves includes an upward adjustment of 1.967 million barrels per day, or about 14 million barrels for the whole week.
Matt Smith, a senior analyst at Kpler, told MarketWatch that the adjustment “was the result of previous underestimation of imports and/or production and overestimation of exports and/or refinery capacity.”
Meanwhile, the International Energy Agency (IEA) raised its forecast for oil demand growth in 2023 by 94,000 bpd, according to its monthly report.
Thus, analysts have increased the estimate of demand in 2022 compared to the previous report by 107 thousand b / s – up to 99.96 million b / s, and the forecast for 2023 increased by 202 thousand b / s – to a record 101.92 million b / s. Thus, the IEA expects global oil demand to increase by 1.96 mln bpd this year compared to 1.87 mln bpd a month earlier.
