Oil futures traded higher Wednesday, buoyed after an industry trade group reported a fall in U.S. crude supplies.
West Texas Intermediate crude for September delivery CL.1, +1.70% on the New York Mercantile Exchange gained 68 cents, or 1.7%, to reach $42.29 a barrel, after WTI finished Tuesday’s session down 0.8%. Meanwhile, the global benchmark, October Brent crude BRNV20, +1.59%, traded 67 cents, or 1.5%, higher at $45.17 a barrel on ICE Futures Europe, following a 1.1% decline in the previous session.
The American Petroleum Institute reported late Tuesday that U.S. crude supplies dropped by 4.4 million barrels for the week ended Aug. 7, according to sources. The API data also showed gasoline stockpiles declined by 1.3 million barrels, they said, while distillate inventories were down by 2.9 million barrels. Crude stocks at the Cushing, Okla., storage hub, meanwhile, edged up by 1.1 million barrels for the week.
More closely followed inventory data from the Energy Information Administration is due Wednesday at 10:30 a.m. Eastern Time. The EIA data are expected to show crude inventories fell by 4.7 million barrels last week, according to analysts polled by S&P Global Platts. They also forecast supply declines of 2.1 million barrels for gasoline and 100,000 barrels in distillates.
Some analysts were unimpressed with crude’s gains following the data.
“We should have seen a more significant bounce on the inventory data and favorable bend in some of the COVID-19 curves,” said Stephen Innes, chief global markets strategist at AxiCorp, in a note.
The “big elephant in the room” remains the global COVID-19 case count, he said, with the number exceeding 20 million on Tuesday.
“It’s worth highlighting that it took six months for cases to reach 10 million after the first infection surfaced in China while the second 10 million took only six weeks,” he said.
In other energy trading, September gasoline RBU20, +2.37% was up 1.9% at $1.2271 a gallon, while September heating oil HOU20, +1.40% gained 1.1% to $1.2522 a gallon.
September natural-gas futures NG00, -1.24% lost 1.5% to trade at $2.138 per million British thermal units.
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