Oil prices of benchmark grades are weakly falling Thursday morning after an increase in the previous session.
The price of September futures for Brent on London’s ICE Futures Exchange stood at $76.41 a barrel by 8:10 a.m., down $0.24 (0.31%) from the close of the previous session. Those contracts rose $0.4 (0.5%) to $76.65 a barrel on Wednesday.
The price of WTI crude futures for August at electronic trades of NYMEX fell by 6 cents (0.08%) to $71.73 per barrel by that time. The day before these contracts rose $2 (2.9%) to $71.79 a barrel.
A positive factor in previous session was the statements of the Minister of Energy of Saudi Arabia Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman that OPEC+ will do everything necessary to support the oil market.
On Monday, Saudi Arabia announced an extension of its voluntary oil production cut of 1 million bpd for August. Thus, the country’s oil production will remain at around 9 mln bpd in August.
Meanwhile, according to the American Petroleum Institute (API), U.S. oil inventories fell by 4.38 million barrels last week.
Official data from the nation’s Energy Department will be released Thursday at 6 p.m. Q, a day later than usual since Tuesday was a non-working day in the States. Experts polled by Trading Economics, on average, forecast a decrease in oil reserves by about 1 million barrels.
