Analysts polled by Reuters have forecast a decline of 2.7 million barrels in USA crude last week while trade group American Petroleum Institute has indicated the drop could be as large as 3.6 million barrels.
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Futures rose as much as 1.8% after closing above $50 a barrel on Tuesday for the first time since July.
Crude stocks at the Cushing, Oklahoma, delivery hub fell by 1.4 million barrels, EIA said.
The price of West Texas Intermediate crude, the US benchmark, rose 1.3% to $51.03 at 7:54 a.m.
“Continued supply disruptions in Nigeria as well as a draw in USA crude oil inventories and increased Chinese oil imports” were supporting prices on Wednesday, said Michael Poulsen, oil analyst at Global Risk Management.
The International Energy Agency in its May report projected a remarkable turnaround of just 200,000 barrels a day of growth in global oil stocks in the second half of this year, dramatically reduced from the 1.3 million estimated for the first semester, though the math behind the numbers is not clear.
Oil has surged since hitting near 13-year lows at the start of the year thanks to the drop in the US dollar as well as signs of a recovery in the global economy and lower production in Canada and Nigeria. Stockpiles reached an 87-year high of 543.4 million barrels in the last week of April.
ANZ bank said that price rises were “tempered by an increase in crude production of 10,000 barrels per day to 8.75 million barrels per day and the number of active rigs increasing by 9 to 325”. “Nigerian production is now below 1 million barrels and the situation seems to be spiraling out of control”.
It said, “Today, crude oil alone is lower by more than one million bpd from its peak at the beginning of 2015”.
Nigeria’s production declined by 160,000 barrels per day to 1.45 million, according to the survey. Futures touched $52.47, the highest since 12 October. Supplies remain about 130 million barrels above the five-year seasonal average.
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Expectations that the Federal Reserve will not raise interest rates until September at the earliest has put downward pressure on the dollar, making the black gold cheaper for anyone buying it with other currencies. Oil prices are up more than 90% since the lows in February 2016.
