OPEC expects growth in 2017 non-OPEC oil supply

The IEA said that preliminary data for February showed a modest decline of 5 million barrels, despite the USA showing large weekly stock builds.

Market confidence faltered earlier this week, after news of another big rise in US crude inventories to record highs as domestic oil production has grown. US West Texas Intermediate crude (WTI) was up 3 cents at $48.43 a barrel by 0329 GMT.

Brent crude had by 0011 GMT (8:11 p.m. ET) fallen 42 cents, or 0.82 percent, to its lowest since November 30 at $50.95 per barrel.

Oil prices on Tuesday surrendered gains since a November OPEC deal to curb output, worsening the slide in a flagship crude oil commodity exchange traded product and sending it to a fresh multimonth low.

Global crude oil prices on Tuesday fell to three-month low after Opec reported that crude inventories in developed countries had risen above the five-year average in January despite production cuts by some of the world’s largest exporters.

Gasoline inventories remain high regionally and the Oil Price Information Service (OPIS) reports that the healthy supply should keep prices relatively stable as the market prepares for the transition to summer-blend gasoline.

United States crude stocks fell by 531,000 barrels last week, industry group the American Petroleum Institute (API) said on Tuesday after settlement.

Since last Monday, the price of oil has fallen by more than eight per cent, marking its biggest week-on-week drop in four months.

Please Wait while comments are loading. Russian Federation itself pledged to reduce by 300,000 barrels a day along with OPEC, but has cut less than half of that.

Global oil supplies rose by 260,000 barrels a day in February to 96.52 million b/d, as both OPEC and non-OPEC producers pumped more crude, the International Energy Agency said on Wednesday. We discussed yesterday how the rise in USA crude inventories this year (hark, 800,000 bpd) was offsetting that of last quarter’s OECD stock draw (hark, 800,000 bpd). Saudi Arabia’s Energy Ministry said that the volume of crude supplied to markets nonetheless fell by 90,000 barrels a day to 9.9 million, as the extra supplies were moved into storage.

“It’s all about the short-term glut that we have to deal with today, with the potential shortage months down the road”, Phil Flynn, senior market analyst at Price Futures Group in Chicago, said by telephone.

That’s because the dollar is not a petrocurrency, the term given to currencies of countries like Canada that export oil and rely on the resulting revenue for economic growth.