LONDON—Crude-oil futures were slightly lower, in part on a firmer dollar, as traders awaited widely watched U.S. weekly oil inventories.
For the moment, the market will carry on trading on external factors with "full focus on the currency market," said Andrey Kryuchenkov, vice president of commodities research at VTB Capital.
The dollar has firmed against the euro on the likely absence of a rescue plan for Greece at this wee's European Union summit.
"For our markets, this means that the dollar still has the potential to appreciate rather significantly and on relatively short notice, and so for the moment, we would be cautious about being long energy," said Edward Meir, senior commodity analyst at MF Global.
The front-month May Brent contract on London's ICE futures exchange recently was down $0.18 at $80.36 a barrel. The front-month May light, sweet crude contract on the New York Mercantile Exchange was trading $0.21 lower at $81.39 a barrel.
The ICE's gasoil contract for April delivery was up $3.25 at $665.50 a metric ton, while Nymex gasoline for April delivery was down 0.52 cents at $2.2510 a gallon.
The U.S. Department of Energy is scheduled to release data on oil inventories for the week ended March 19 on Wednesday. The American Petroleum Institute, an industry group, will issue its data late Tuesday.
U.S. crude-oil stocks are expected to increase by 1.2 million barrels, while gasoline and distillates stocks are likely to be down 1.1 million barrels and 700,000 barrels respectively, according to the mean of forecasts by eight analysts surveyed by Dow Jones Newswires.
The focus will be trained on gasoline stocks, given the approach of the summer driving season in the U.S. Despite continuous declines since early March, the overall level of gasoline stocks are still above the five-year average.
The surplus is "certainly not huge" but it is still troublesome, especially if refiners expect to see "a strong improvement in their margins over the next couple of months," said Dominick A. Chirichella, an analyst at Energy Management Institute.
