The market is supported by the data on decrease of reserves in the USA, published the day before, as well as the information on increase of prices for most grades of oil by Saudi Arabia for the buyers from all regions.
The September futures for Brent crude oil on London’s ICE Futures Exchange stood at $76.85 per barrel by 8:15 a.m. on Friday, $0.33 (0.43%) above the previous session’s closing price. Those contracts fell $0.13 (0.2%) to $76.52 a barrel on Thursday.
The price of WTI futures for August at electronic trades of NYMEX grew by $0.32 (0.45%) up to $72.12 per barrel by that time. The price of these contracts remained practically unchanged the day before and amounted to $71.8 per barrel by market close.
According to U.S. Department of Energy, last week commercial oil inventories in the country decreased by 1.5 mln barrels to 452.2 mln barrels. Gasoline inventories decreased by 2.5 million barrels and distillates by 1 million barrels.
Experts polled by S&P Global Commodity Insights, on average, predicted a 3.6 million barrels reduction of oil reserves, 1.7 million barrels of gasoline and 700,000 barrels of distillates.
Stocks at Cushing terminal, which stores crude oil traded on Nymex, decreased by 400,000 barrels to 42.8 million barrels over the week.
Saudi Arabia will raise prices for all grades of crude in August for customers in the United States, Northwest Europe and the Mediterranean, as well as some grades for customers in Asia, state-run Saudi Aramco said Thursday.
“Macroeconomic uncertainty and concerns about the pace of China’s economic recovery are impediments to a further rebound in oil prices,” said ING analyst Warren Patterson.
“Expectations of a stronger Federal Reserve hawkish mood are also not supporting risk appetite,” Market Watch quotes the expert as saying.
