The American Petroleum Institute (API) reported yet another major draw of 6.796 million barrels of United States crude oil inventories for the week ending July 7 compared to analyst expectations that this week would see a smaller-but still large-draw in crude oil inventories of 4.489 million barrels
Last week, the American Petroleum Institute (API) reported a large draw of 4.5 million barrels of crude oil.
The API reported a draw in gasoline inventories for week ending July 7 in the amount of 1.59 million barrels. Analyst expectations were for a smaller draw of 750,000 barrels.
Crude oil prices were up today on multiple supply outages including a weeks-long Libyan oil production disruption and a months-long Venezuelan supply drop, Syncrude's long-lasting oil sands outage, and a strike by two Norwegian oil workers' trade unions that was announced today that disrupted production at Shell's Knarr field and may disrupt more oil production in the days to come. Add to that Iran's soon-to-come curtailment of oil exports, and the outages may very well surpass OPEC's ability to ramp up oil production in quantities that will stave off a supply crunch.
At 3:46 p.m. EDT, WTI crude was trading at $74.04, up $0.19 (+0.26%). Brent crude was trading at $78.76, up $0.69 (0.88%) on the day.
US crude oil production growth is no longer pulling on the oil price reigns. At 10.9 million bpd for the week ending June 29, US production has held steady for four weeks in a row, according to the EIA.
Related: Iran Sanctions Are Different This Time
Distillate inventories saw a build this week of 1.952 million barrels, compared to an expected build of 1.2 million barrels. Inventories at the Cushing, Oklahoma site fell by 1.925 million barrels.
The U.S. Energy Information Administration report on crude oil inventories is due to be released on Wednesday at 10:30a.m. EDT.
By 4:40pm EDT, both benchmarks were trading up, with the WTI benchmark trading up 0.31% on the day to $74.08 and Brent trading up 1.08% at $78.91.
By Julianne Geiger for Oilprice.com
More Top Reads From Oilprice.com:
Julianne Geiger is a veteran editor, writer and researcher for Oilprice.com, and a member of the Creative Professionals Networking Group. More
Comments