Meanwhile, prices for natural-gas recouped about half of what they lost a day earlier, after a U.S. government report revealed a weekly increase in supplies of the commodity that was below some market expectations. September West Texas Intermediate crude fell $1, or 2.2%, to settle at $44.75 a barrel on its first full trading day on the New York Mercantile Exchange as a front-month contract. The contract gained 0.7% on Wednesday. September Brent crude London’s ICE Futures exchange lost 97 cents, or 2.1%, to $46.20 a barrel. Losses in the last half-hour of trading Thursday accelerated, following sharperdeclines in the U.S. stock market, said Phil Flynn, senior market analyst at Price Futures Group. “Also, talk that Libya might restart its export terminal” took some support away from oil, he said.

Traders spent the session parsing through recent petroleum data. The Energy Information Administration on Wednesday reported a 2.3 million-barrel decline in U.S. crude inventories for the week ended July 15, but it also said that gasoline stocks unexpectedly climbed by 900,000 barrels. Gasoline supplies rose for the fourth time in five weeks, according to Joseph George, commodity analyst at Schneider Electric. The strong “build to gasoline stocks is partially due to higher refinery utilization, which added some bullishness to the report,” he said, as it points to a draw down in crude inventories to make the fuel. However, Stuart Ive, a client manager at the New Zealand-based OM Financial, said “the continued gasoline builds have led some to speculate that this will lead to builds in crude as refineries cut back on production.”

Looking ahead for oil, “the global crude market could take longer to balance than expected, as key producers around the world maintain drilling and supply disruptions ease,” he said. There has also been growing concern that while crude production has generally fallen, the pace of the declines has slowed. The average pace of U.S. crude production declines in May was 42,500 barrels a day—”the highest of the year, and a few weeks later WTI prices peaked just below $52 on June 8,” which was a new 2016 high, said Tyler Richey, co-editor of The 7:00’s Report. But with the with the current four-week moving average falling back to a U.S. output decline of 27,500 barrels a day, “the time frame for the global production surplus to come into balance is being pushed back,” said Richey.