At around 0330 GMT, the USA benchmarkWestTexas Intermediate (WTI) for delivery in April was down one cent at Dollars 33.06 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange.
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US crude settled down 29 cents at $32.78 a barrel, after gaining nearly $1.70 earlier.
Crude oil prices rose sharply by Rs 81 to Rs 2,283 per barrel in futures trade on Friday as speculators widened their bets even as it resumed fall in the global market.
Prices had traded at highs above $34, but turned negative in the minutes ahead of Friday’s Nymex settlement. In January, Saudi Arabia produced about 10.1 million barrels a day, roughly 44,000 barrels higher than the previous month.
Moreover, the U.S. Commerce Department said Friday in its second estimate that the country’s real gross domestic product (GDP) increased at an annual rate of 1 percent in the fourth quarter of 2015, beating market consensus of 0.4 percent.
Oil prices fell on Thursday on concerns about oversupply amid a slowing global economy, although strong USA gasoline demand helped limit losses.
Prices have been extremely volatile in recent weeks on uncertainty over whether the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries will stop pumping at a pace that is outstripping demand.
Prices had already resumed last week after Russian Federation and Saudi Arabia, following a first meeting in Doha with Qatar and Venezuela, had proposed that all producing countries freeze their production level to that January to support prices.
But Iran has reacted coldly to the plan and is ramping up production after nuclear-linked Western economic sanctions were recently lifted.
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In any case, we expect many more spurious headlines, mostly out of Venezuela for whom the day of reckoning draws ever closer should oil fail to rebound sustainable from current prices. The Gulf Coast, Midwest, and West Coast regions of the United States constitute the majority of crude oil refinery demand.
