A larger than expected build in United States crude inventories caused West Texas Intermediate prices to fall slightly after the American Petroleum Institute's weekly supply report hit the press Tuesday afternoon.
Crude inventories were up 3.65 million barrels.
Supplies at the Cushing, Oklahoma, storage site saw the biggest increase since August, storing 1.13 million barrels more than last week. According to Zerohedge, experts expected the build to equal just 150,000 barrels.
Distillates jumped by almost 3 million barrels after eight weeks of consistent draws.
The only dip this week was gasoline inventories, which declined by 155,000 barrels - far less than the 1.1 million drop that industry insiders predicted.
Overall, oil prices still saw a day of good returns. At the time of this article's writing, WTI prices traded at a premium of 5.52 percent at $45.71, while Brent prices stood 5.55 percent higher at $46.88.
Last week - just a few hours after Donald Trump won the presidential election - the Energy Information Administration (EIA) reported a build of 2.4 million barrels of crude in U.S. commercial inventories. The latest API report will either be confirmed or denied by tomorrow's official EIA figures.
After the Republican win, benchmark oil prices quickly recovered the losses registered on voting day, and even started climbing up. Trump has vowed to make the United States energy independent by cutting off access to foreign sources of oil, while promising a go-ahead for the Keystone XL pipeline and new clean coal and shale projects.
By Zainab Calcuttawala for Oilprice.com
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Zainab Calcuttawala is an American journalist based in Morocco. She completed her undergraduate coursework at the University of Texas at Austin (Hook’em) and reports on… More
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