Oil futures edged higher Wednesday, steadying as investors weighed concerns over the outlook for crude demand while awaiting weekly U.S. supply data.
Price action
-
West Texas Intermediate crude for June delivery
CL00,
+0.86% CL.1,
+0.86% CLM23,
+0.86%
rose 25 cents, or 0.4%, to $71.11 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange. -
July Brent crude
BRN00,
+0.84% BRNN23,
+0.84% ,
the global benchmark, was up 22 cents, or 0.3%, at $75.13 a barrel on ICE Futures Europe. -
Back on Nymex, June gasoline
RBM23,
+1.37%
rose 0.6% to $2.494 a gallon, while June heating oil
HOM23,
+0.99%
edged up 0.3% to $2.371 a gallon. -
June natural gas
NGM23,
-1.01%
gained 1.1% to $2.401 per million British thermal units.
Market drivers
Crude fell Tuesday after disappointment in economic data out of China. Demand concerns have plagued crude, with both WTI and Brent suffering four straight weekly declines.
“Oil prices have been log-jammed between fundamentally oversold territory and lacking acute catalysts to shock prices materially higher over the near term,” said Michael Tran, commodity and digital intelligence strategist at RBC Capital Markets, in a note.
Real-time physical indicators remain mixed, at best, he said.
“The market always expected sloppy Q1 balances, but halfway through the second quarter and the physical market is not tracking meaningfully better, yet,” he wrote. “Many market hopes hinged on China’s re-opening as being a binary market moving event, but even that framework has been mixed…and peak turnarounds are more than a month away.”
On Tuesday, the American Petroleum Institute reported a 3.7 million barrel rise in U.S. crude inventories last week, according to a source citing the data, while gasoline stocks fell 2.5 million barrels and distillates declined by 900,000 barrels.
Official data from the Energy Information Administration was due Wednesday morning. Analysts surveyed by The Wall Street Journal, on average, looked for crude inventories to show a fall of 800,000 barrels.
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