Brent crude futures were down 31 cents, or 0.6 percent, at $48.96 per barrel by 10:27 a.m. EDT (1427 GMT).
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On the New York Mercantile Exchange, light, sweet crude futures for delivery in October CLV6, +0.38% traded at $47.12 a barrel, up $0.14 in the Globex electronic session.
In the near term, the market will be taking cues from weekly USA crude and gasoline inventories data to be released Wednesday.
Oil prices made some headway ahead of the United States open on Tuesday with fresh speculation over potential OPEC action to curb production in September.
The U.S. dollar has retreated from Monday’s peak as investors look ahead to jobs data this week that Federal Reserve Vice Chair Stanley Fischer has said will be important to whether the U.S. central bank raises interest rates soon. A cap on production would be positive for the market, Saudi Arabia’s Energy Minister Khalid Al-Falih said in an interview last week, while ruling out a cut to output.
USA crude production will increase, but will likely fall short of the levels seen between 2011 and 2014, ABN AMRO senior energy economist Hans Van Cleef said.
A Reuters report observed that oil prices are caught between concerns about oversupply and a strong dollar on the as well as the prospect of a potential production freeze, adding that the huge global oil oversupply that has weighed on prices for the past two years may not clear until the second half of 2017. Central time. The contract declined 63 cents to settle at $46.35 on Tuesday. Total volume traded was 21 percent above the 100-day average.
Iraq would support a decision by OPEC to freeze oil output to prop up prices, Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi told a news conference in Baghdad on Tuesday.
While oil prices have escaped a 13-year nadir seen in February, the general mood of the energy market remains bearish as the world is still inundated with surplus barrels.
Although, there is speculation that Saudi Arabia and the rest of the OPEC nations will agree to a production freeze with Russian Federation and other non-OPEC members, Iran, the third-largest producer in OPEC, had refused to join a previous attempt this year to stabilise production.
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Iran’s official Islamic Republic News Agency reported Tuesday that oil minister Bijan Zangeneh said that his country planned to increase production in order to regain market share lost while his country was under global sanctions.
