Refinery utilization rates rose by 0.9 percentage point. “Now that short covering is continuing”, said Lipow. The turnaround in the equity markets, combined with the higher dollar, was too much for a few long investors to handle, and the market retreated to lower for the session.
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Oil rebounded after tumbling more than 20% into a bear market, closing below $40 a barrel on Tuesday for the first time since April.
U.S. West Texas Intermediate (WTI) crude futures CLc1 dropped 60 cents, or 1.4 percent, to $41.33 per barrel, after a session low at $41.24.
Total products supplied over the last four-week period averaged about 20.5 million barrels per day, up by 0.6 percent from the same period a year ago.
Brent for October settlement climbed $1.19, or 2.8 percent, to close at $44.29 a barrel on the London-based ICE Futures Europe exchange on Thursday.
“We’re seeing rebalancing”, Scott Darling, regional head of oil and gas at JPMorgan Chase & Co., said in a Bloomberg Television interview. “Global fundamentals are balanced. We are going into the third and fourth quarters with those supplies back online and refinery maintenance coming up”.
The volume of crude oil transported by rail plummeted 45 percent during the first five months of 2016 compared with the same period past year, the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) reported yesterday. Indeed, data released on Wednesday showed that U.S. production excluding Alaska, which has very little shale oil reserves, did not fall for the first time since early March as production from new wells offset declines in output from older ones.
US crude inventories added over a million barrels of oil last week, a development that will likely stoke concerns of a persistent global oil glut.
Crude stocks at the Cushing, Oklahoma, delivery hub fell by 1.12 million barrels, said the Energy Information Administration, the department’s statistical arm.
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Two oil-export ports in Mexico were closed ahead of a storm, according to a statement by Mexico’s merchant marine. In other USA economic news, with the oil report taking the center stage, a few reports on the strength of the services sector of the economy took a backseat. The storm is forecast to skirt the southern edge of the Bay of Campeche on Friday as a depression, the weakest tropical system.
