LONDON—Crude-oil futures ticked higher Wednesday, responding to a rally in the euro against the dollar.
But prices remain lower than at the same time Tuesday. In the previous session, there was a sharp sell-off in the afternoon, with the falls accelerating after the U.S. Federal Reserve warned of potential deflation and opened the door for additional quantitative easing.
The front-month November Brent contract on London's ICE futures exchange was 26 cents higher at $78.68 a barrel.
The front-month November light, sweet crude contract on the New York Mercantile Exchange, called West Texas Intermediate, is trading 51 cents higher at $75.48 a barrel.
Tuesday afternoon's falls coincided with the expiry of the October WTI contract, which saw hefty losses and dragged down November WTI at the same time.
The American Petroleum Institute, a trade body, also compounded the bearish sentiment with the release of its weekly oil inventory statistics late Tuesday.
Crude inventories rose 2.2 million barrels for the week ended Sept. 17, despite the closure that week of the Enbridge 6A pipeline, which pumps oil from Canada into the U.S. Midwest.
"The build in crude-oil inventories came as a surprise since the market expected a significant draw due to the one-week outage of the Enbridge 6A pipeline," said Filip Petersson, an analyst at SEB Commodity Research.
"The outage should have reduced U.S. crude-oil imports by 4-5 million barrels."
The more-influential weekly oil inventory statistics from the U.S. Department of Energy are due to be released at 1430 GMT.
Crude stocks are expected to fall by 1.7 million barrels, according to the mean of 14 analysts' forecasts. Gasoline stocks are forecast to fall by 400,000 barrels, while distillate stocks are expected to fall by 200,000 barrels.
But traders will also be looking for how much demand there is for oil products, particularly gasoline, in the world's largest oil consumer.
"While MasterCard Advisors reported a rise in gasoline demand to over nine million barrels a day last week for the first time in five weeks, demand has fallen on last year and has been merely 0.8% higher than last year since the start of this year," said Eugen Weinberg, head of commodity research at Commerzbank.
