Oil prices are rising in the morning trading on Tuesday on information about further weakening of anti-coke measures in China and closure of some refineries in the US due to bad weather.
The price of February futures for Brent crude oil on London’s ICE Futures Exchange stood at $84.4 a barrel by 7:20 a.m. Tuesday, up $0.48 (0.57%) from the close of the previous session. Those contracts rose $2.94 (3.6%) to $83.92 a barrel in trading the previous Friday. There were no oil trades on Monday because of the Catholic Christmas.
The price of WTI crude futures for February increased by $0.5 (0.63%) to $80.06 per barrel in electronic trading on the New York Mercantile Exchange (NYMEX) by that time. By closing of previous trades the cost of these contracts grew by $2.07 (2.6%) to $79.56 per barrel.
Chinese authorities will cancel obligatory quarantine for people arriving in the country from abroad since January 8, Bloomberg informs. In addition, Beijing has downgraded its COVID-19 surveillance, abandoning the legal basis for imposing harsh measures to combat the spread of infection. “Our priorities should shift from preventing and controlling (the coronavirus – IF) to treating it,” said Liang Wannian, head of the COVID-19 expert group under China’s National Health Commission, in an interview for People’s Daily.
Market participants are also following the news from the USA where the production of petroleum products is falling due to the difficult weather conditions in the key regions which were covered by a snowstorm. Thus, production was stopped at two major refineries Motiva Port Arthur and Marathon Galveston Bay in Texas. According to Bloomberg, their capacity is more than 1.8 million barrels per day.
