Fueling Strategy: Fill as needed tonight, Be Safe Tonight!

NYMEX Crude $ 29.69 DN $1.2000
NY Harbor ULSD $1.0464 DN $0.0126
NYMEX Gasoline $ .9561 DN $0.0366

NEWS
Oil futures logged a third straight session loss on Monday, with West Texas Intermediate prices settling back under $30 a barrel on continuing fears about the global oversupply of crude and a lack of action among major producers to cut output.

On the New York Mercantile Exchange, March West Texas Intermediate crude declined by $1.20, or 3.9%, to settle at $29.69 a barrel. Prices, which already lost about 4.3% over the past two trading sessions, marked their lowest settlement since Jan. 21. Brent crude the global oil benchmark, fell $1.18, or 3.5%, to $32.88 a barrel on London’s ICE Futures exchange.

The meeting “produced no apparent change in Saudi Arabia’s stance regarding … its unwillingness to participate in an emergency OPEC meeting,” said Tim Evans, energy analyst at Citi Futures and OTC Clearing. “This sets the bar for success at about the lowest level imaginable, in our view, and leaves the market facing ongoing physical oversupply.” Hopes for an agreement between producers within and outside of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries to cut output and support prices had already been fading in recent days.

Meanwhile, “demand data look weak and without an improvement in fundamentals, currency-driven gains seem unlikely to persist,” said Kevin Norrish, analyst at Barclays. According to the bank, data on oil demand in the world’s two largest markets, the U.S. and China, has taken a “sharp turn for the worse.”

U.S. demand for oil products in January fell 3.9% compared with January 2015. In China, although overall oil demand was flat in December and an improvement on November’s outright decline, it still represented the second weakest reading for the year, the bank said. According a report from Platts China Oil Analytics dated Sunday, China’s apparent oil demand contracted by 0.8% in December from a year earlier to 11.35 million barrels a day. For the full year, however, demand rose 5.8% to 11.11 million barrels a day. Since oil prices started to plunge in the second half of 2014, there have been few production halts, apart from some projects in Canada’s onshore and oil sands, conventional U.S. onshore projects and aging U.K. North Sea fields, according to consultancy Wood Mackenzie.

In the U.S., the number of rigs drilling for oil fell by 31 to 467 last week, according to data from Baker Hughes Inc. released Friday. The rig count, viewed as a proxy for activity in the oil industry, has fallen by more than 60% since a peak in October 2014. However, the decline has failed to buoy market sentiment as oil production per rig continued to hit new highs, according to an ANZ Bank report. U.S. oil production has kept stable around 9.2 million barrel a day in recent months, despite the fall in drilling. The U.S. Energy Information Administration will release its monthly drilling productivity report late Monday. It’ll offer forecasts on March U.S. shale production.