The American Petroleum Institute (API) reported a draw of 761,000 barrels in United States crude oil inventories, compared to analyst expectations that inventories would build by 3.422 million barrels for the week ending September 22.
Gasoline inventories built for the first time in two weeks, by 1.470 million barrels for the week ending September 22, against an expected draw of 921,000 barrels.
Both WTI and Brent benchmarks fell on Tuesday, but they were both still up over $2.00 week on week. WTI hit 7-month high yesterday at the close of trade, at $52.22. While OPEC failed to deliver to the market any surprises after its OPEC meet in Vienna last week, Turkey's threat to choke off Kurdish oil exports-along with the gradual acceptance that commercial oil stocks are indeed dwindling-seem to be the catalysts this week that is propping up oil prices.
At 2:40pm EST, WTI was trading down 0.69% (-$0.36) at $51.86, while Brent crude traded down 0.92% (-$0.54) at $57.89-dollars above last week's levels.
Gasoline was also trading down on Tuesday, at $1.64, down 1.54% on the day.
This week's crude oil inventory draw should renew investor faith that the previous lengthy streak of draws-interrupted by a few weeks of builds-is still ongoing. The total draw for crude oil in 2017 now stands at just shy of 23 million barrels.
Related: Robust Demand Could Send Oil Prices Above $60
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Distillate inventories fell again this week, by 4.527 million barrels. Inventories at the Cushing, Oklahoma, site increased by 1.064 million barrels.
By 4:40pm EST, WTI was trading up a bit after the data, but still down on the day, at $51.90 with Brent Crude trading at $57.87.
The U.S. Energy Information Administration report on oil inventories is due on Wednesday at 10:30 a.m. EDT.
By Julianne Geiger for Oilprice.com
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Julianne Geiger is a veteran editor, writer and researcher for Oilprice.com, and a member of the Creative Professionals Networking Group. More
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