BLBG:WTI Swings After Biggest Gain in Week as Oil Supply Seen Rising
West Texas Intermediate crude was little changed after the biggest increase in a week. A report today is forecast to show stockpiles rose to the highest level since June in the U.S., the world’s biggest oil consumer.
Futures swung between gains and losses in New York after the industry-funded American Petroleum Institute said crude supplies increased 599,000 barrels last week. The government will report today that inventories rose by 800,000 barrels to 386.2 million, according to a Bloomberg News survey. Brent’s premium widened for a fourth time yesterday on speculation that protests in Libya will disrupt the nation’s oil exports.
“The anchor is U.S. supply,” Phil Flynn, a senior market analyst at Price Futures Group in Chicago said by phone. Protests in Libya that blocked an oil tanker from loading “raised market concerns,” he said.
WTI for December delivery was up 3 cents at $93.91 a barrel in electronic trading on the New York Mercantile Exchange at 2:11 p.m. Singapore time. It rose 0.9 percent to $93.88 yesterday. The volume of all futures traded was about 41 percent below the 100-day average.
Brent for December settlement, which expires today, gained 16 cents to $107.28 a barrel on the London-based ICE Futures Europe exchange. The more-actively traded January contract rose 14 cents to $107.03. The front-month European benchmark crude was at a premium of $13.38 to WTI. The spread was $13.24 at yesterday’s close, the widest since April 2.
Fuel Supplies
U.S. crude stockpiles at Cushing, Oklahoma, the delivery point for WTI contracts and the nation’s biggest oil-storage hub, increased by 1.67 million barrels last week, the API in Washington said yesterday.
Gasoline inventories fell by 1.67 million barrels, API data showed. An Energy Information Administration report today will probably show they declined by 900,000 barrels, according to the median estimate of 11 analysts in the Bloomberg survey.
Distillate supplies, a category that includes heating oil and diesel, rose by 606,000 barrels, the API said. The report from the EIA, the Energy Department’s statistical arm, will show they fell 1 million barrels, according to the survey.
Libya Unrest
In Libya, the holder of Africa’s largest oil reserves, about 300 protesters stopped an tanker from loading at the country’s Hariga port, Mohamed Elharari, a spokesman for state-run National Oil Corp., said by phone from Tripoli yesterday.
Protests at Libya’s 120,000 barrel-a-day Zawiya refinery kept the plant closed for more than a day, Ibrahim Al Awami, the oil ministry’s head of measurement and inspection, said by phone yesterday. Another official later said the facility had reopened.
Libya produced 450,000 barrels of oil a day last month, compared with 1.45 million in the same period last year, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Labor disputes at ports, storage facilities and oil fields have crippled shipments from nation, a member of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries.
To contact the reporter on this story: Ben Sharples in Melbourne at bsharples@bloomberg.net
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Alexander Kwiatkowski at akwiatkowsk2@bloomberg.net
