Oil futures finished lower on Wednesday, with U.S. benchmark prices posting their first loss in five sessions after government data revealed a more than 17 million-barrel climb in domestic commercial inventories over the past two weeks.
Price action
-
West Texas Intermediate crude
CL00,
+0.01%
for December delivery
CL.1,
+0.01% CLZ23
fell $1.60, or 2%, to settle at $76.66 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange. Prices settled flat Tuesday after tallying three consecutive session gains. -
January Brent crude
BRN00,
+0.03% BRNF24,
the global benchmark, declined $1.29, or 1.6%, to $81.18 a barrel on ICE Futures Europe. -
December gasoline
RBZ23
declined by 0.9% to $2.20 a gallon, while December heating oil added 1.1% to $2.87 a gallon. -
Natural gas for December delivery
NGZ23
settled at $3.19 per million British thermal units, up 2.7%
Market drivers
The Energy Information Administration on Wednesday released two weeks of U.S. petroleum supply data, after having delayed last weeks’ numbers due to planned system updates.
The government agency reported that U.S. commercial crude inventories rose by 3.6 million barrels for the week ended Nov. 10 to total 439.4 million barrels.
Using the commercial crude supply totals it provided in its data, supplies had climbed from 421.9 million barrels in the week ended Oct. 27 to 435.8 million barrels in the week ended Nov. 3 — showing an increase of 13.9 million barrels. Added to the latest week’s rise, commercial crude supplies rose by 17.5 million barrels over the two-week period ended Nov. 10.
On average, analysts polled by S&P Global Commodity Insights expected the report to show an increase of 4.5 million barrels for the two weeks ended Nov. 10.
For the week ended Nov. 10, the EIA report also revealed supply declines of 1.5 million barrels to 215.7 million barrels for gasoline and 1.4 million to 106.6 million barrels for distillates.
Crude stocks at the Cushing, Okla., Nymex delivery hub fell by 1.9 million barrels last week, the EIA said, and domestic petroleum production remained unchanged at 13.2 million barrels a day.
The EIA has also said it’s made changes to the way it collects some of its data.
Read: Why the U.S. government is changing the way it collects data on the oil market
In this case, however, Troy Vincent, senior market analyst at DTN, doesn’t believe the big crude-supply climb had anything to do with those adjustments.
The big build is in line with what the American Petroleum Institute reported for the week ended Nov. 3. The trade group reported on Nov. 7 that domestic commercial crude supplies for the week ended Nov. 3 climbed by 11.9 million barrels, according to sources.
The supply gain “simply reflects rising imports amid a very deep refinery maintenance season,” said Vincent.
Also see Drop in U.S. gasoline prices will lead to more than $1 billion in Thanksgiving travel savings: report
WTI crude-oil futures had been trading lower ahead of the inventory data as investors digested a “terrible” New York Empire State Manufacturing release, said Tyler Richey, co-editor at Sevens Report Research.
The economic data “poured some cold water on soft economic landing hopes, while the ongoing conflict between Israel and Hamas has yet to have a meaningful impact on the global oil markets,” he told MarketWatch.
“As such, the fear-bid in oil has been slowly but steadily unwinding over the last month,” he said.
Also read: Here are the biggest clean-energy transition challenges and investment opportunities
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