Oil declines (craters) with demand worries-derp!- rise in U.S. supplies pulling prices to their lowest since July
(At this rate of decline you might even see some OPEC cuts sooner rather than after January-of course the DOE said they would start to fill it 3 days ago but doing and saying are 2 different things)
Oil futures declined on Thursday, with worries about energy demand and a sharp rise in U.S. crude inventories over the past two weeks prompting prices to trade at their lowest levels since July. Price action
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West Texas Intermediate crude for December delivery fell $2.69, or 3.5%, to $73.97 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange.
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January Brent crude the global benchmark, was down $2.32, or 2.9%, at $78.86 a barrel on ICE Futures Europe. Based on the front-month contracts, Brent and WTI crude were both poised for the lowest settlements since July.
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Gasoline lost 3.4% to $2.1268 a gallon, while December heating oil shed 3% to $2.7818 a gallon.
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Natural gas for December delivery traded at $3.087 per million British thermal units, down 3.2%.
WTI crude prices on Thursday started to “really slide about the time that the poor U.S. industrial-production report came out — a sign of a potentially softening economy that could impact energy demand,” he said.
Industrial production fell 0.6% in October, the Federal Reserve reported Thursday. Economists surveyed by the Wall Street Journal expected a decline of 0.4%.
The National Association of Home Builders monthly confidence index, also released Thursday, showed a decline of 6 points to 34 in November. Cieszynski referred to the reading as “terrible” and said it “adds to the case of softening economy.”
Meanwhile, the Energy Information Administration on Wednesday released two weeks of U.S. petroleum-supply data, after having delayed last week’s numbers due to planned system updates. The government agency reported that U.S. commercial crude inventories rose by 3.6 million barrels for the week ending Nov. 10 to total 439.4 million barrels. The data showed inventories rose 13.9 million barrels in the week ending Nov. 3, for a two-week rise of 17.5 million barrels.
At 439.4 million barrels, crude stocks are below the five-year average but are trending back toward more typical levels for this time of year, ING commodity analysts Warren Patterson and Ewa Manthey noted.
In terms of oil demand, “it also appears that seasonal factors may be playing a role,” SIA Wealth’s Cieszynski said. “Crude oil has dropped off along with gasoline following the end of summer driving and air-travel season, while natural gas has been stable lately,” relatively outperforming oil with the winter home-heating season approaching, he said.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/oil-declines-with-demand-worries-and-rise-in-us-supplies-pulling-prices-to-their-lowest-since-july/ar-AA1k1DiS
https://tradingeconomics.com/commodity/crude-oil