Oil futures edged slightly higher Thursday, shrugging off a demand by President Donald Trump that the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries move to counteract a rally that has prices near or above 3 陆-year highs.
Traders are also awaiting weekly data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration on domestic crude supplies.
West Texas Intermediate crude for August delivery CLQ8, +0.18% �on the New York Mercantile Exchange rose 36 cents, or 0.5%, to $74.50 a barrel, with the U.S. benchmark hitting its highest since November 2014. U.S. markets were closed September for the Independence Day holiday. Brent crude LCOU8, -0.26% the global benchmark, was up 3 cents at $78.27 a barrel on London��s ICE Europe exchange.
Trump on Wednesday again complained via Twitter about rising gas prices and said the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries were doing ��little to help,�� and demanded that the cartel, ��REDUCE PRICING NOW!��
The OPEC Monopoly must remember that gas prices are up & they are doing little to help. If anything, they are driving prices higher as the United States defends many of their members for very little $��s. This must be a two way street. REDUCE PRICING NOW!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 4, 2018The tweet comes after Trump on Saturday tweeted that Saudi Arabia��s King Salman had agreed to increase output by 2 million barrels a day. OPEC and its major producer allies, namely Russia, had agreed in a June meeting to effectively raise output by 1 million barrels a day to help counteract lost barrels from Venezuela and Iran.
Indeed, analysts said Trump��s decision to exit from the Iran nuclear accord and the administration��s demands that countries eliminate purchases of Iranian oil have been a key driver of the rally.
��It does not occur to the U.S. president that it is Trump himself who is driving prices up through his Iran policy. Trump wants all countries to reduce their oil imports from Iran to zero. This would strip up to 2.5 million barrels per day from the market,�� wrote analysts at Commerzbank, in a note. ��The spare capacities in OPEC countries are just sufficient to offset this amount, but will not be enough if supply is additionally reduced by outages elsewhere �� such as in Libya and Canada at present �� and by falling oil production in Venezuela.��
Also, Iran has threatened to block oil shipments through the Strait of Hormuz if the U.S. continues with its calls for renewed sanctions on Tehran.
The weekly EIA data due Thursday morning is expected to show a 4.5 million barrel fall in crude stockpiles, along with a 2.5 million barrel decline in gasoline inventories and a 250,000 barrel drop for distillate stocks, according to a survey conducted by S&P Global Platts.
The release will be ��one of the most-hyped storage reports ever,�� said Robert Yawger, director of energy at Mizuho Securities U.S.A., in a note. The storage figure for the Nymex delivery hub at Cushing, Okla., will be key, he said, with the outage of a Syncrude upgrader in Alberta, Canada, expected to result in a big storage draw, while refinery throughput could top 18 million barrels a day for a record. Exports could also challenge the record 3 million barrels a day seen in last week��s report, he said.
��If all those moving pieces pan out, the market will most likely have to digest a very big crude oil draw, which could rally [August WTI] towards Tuesday��s four year high of $75.27,�� he said.
Nymex August gasoline futures RBQ8, +0.55% �rose 1.64 cents, or 0.8%, to $2.134 a gallon, while August heating oil HOQ8, +0.86% �rose 2.27 cents, or 1%, to $2.1869 a gallon.
August natural-gas futures NGQ18, +0.10% �were off 2 cents, or 0.7%, at $2.85 per million British thermal units.
William Watts William Watts is MarketWatch's deputy markets editor, based in New York. Follow him on Twitter @wlwatts.
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