By Myra P. Saefong and Kate Gibson, MarketWatch
SAN FRANCISCO (MarketWatch) — Crude-oil futures edged higher Thursday as traders key off developments from a meeting of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, during which members are expected to agree to keep the cartel’s production ceiling unchanged.
The OPEC meeting in Vienna comes amid concern that slowing global growth could curb demand for oil and ahead of the official July 1 start of the European Union’s sanctions on Iran, which could hurt global supplies.
July futures for light, sweet crude-oil CLN2 +0.25% rose 11 cents, or 0.1%, to $82.73 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange.
Angola’s Oil Minister Jose Maria Botelho de Vasconcelos said ahead of the OPEC meeting that members will likely agree to maintain their current output ceiling.
OPEC’s collective output ceiling stands at 30 million barrels per day.
During the opening address for the conference, which began earlier, Adbdul-Kareem Luaibi Bahedh, minister of oil of Iraq and President of the conference, referred to the overall economic outlook as “fragile” and said that there is a “disturbing level of [oil] price volatility.”
“The agreement we reached last December restored an important degree of certainty to the supply side of the market, at a time of much uncertainty about demand,” he said. “We shall look carefully at the present conditions in the market. Clearly, there are pressing areas of concern that need to be addressed.”
Earlier U.S. economic data showed initial claims for jobless benefits rising by 6,000 to 386,000 last week. Economists had expected a dip.
Also, consumer prices in May fell 0.3%, with the sharpest drop in nearly three years largely reflecting a recent decline in the price of gasoline.
Natural gas data on tap
Elsewhere in the energy market, natural gas traders awaited a government update on last week’s supplies due shortly.
July natural gas NGN12 +1.24% rose 3 cents, or 1.2%, to $2.21 per million per million British thermal units.
Analysts polled by Platts expect the report to show a climb of between 71 billion cubic feet and 75 billion for the week ending June 8.
Myra Saefong is a MarketWatch reporter based in San Francisco.
Kate Gibson is a reporter for MarketWatch, based in New York. Phani Kumar in Hong Kong contributed to this report.
