Fueling Strategy: Please partial fill only tonight, Friday AM wholesale prices will drop 3 cents – Be Safe Today!
NYMEX Crude $ 41.14 DN $.7800
NY Harbor ULSD $1.2704 DN $.0246
NYMEX Gasoline $1.3062 DN $.0152
NEWS
For oil, unexpected growth in U.S. crude inventories and worries surrounding a potential slowdown in demand kept pressure on prices, but a weaker dollar after the Federal Reserve stood pat on interest rates offered some earlier support.
September WTI crude fell 78 cents, or 1.9%, to settle at $41.14 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange. Prices, which posted losses in each of the last five sessions, settled at the lowest level since mid-April. September Brent crude on London’s ICE Futures exchange fell 77 cents, or 1.8%, to $42.70 a barrel, ahead of the contract’s expiration at Friday’s settlement. “A lot of the focus in the market seems to have been on the supply side of the ledger,” Tim Evans, chief market strategist at Long Leaf Trading Group, told MarketWatch. “Bearish inventory data this week, rising rig counts, and global supply figures that suggest a global glut of crude oil needs to be worked off.”
Oil prices eked out fresh three-month lows after the Energy Information Administration data released Wednesday showed a surprise 1.7-million uptick in U.S. crude stockpiles, keeping total inventories at a historical high. Gasoline inventories rose by 500,000 barrels, also well above the upper limit of the average range, the EIA said. “What is truly noteworthy, however, is the demand side of the ledger,” said Long Leaf Trading’s Evans. “The lack of action by the U.S. [Federal Reserve Wednesday] suggests that we can expect generally weak demand based on the fact that economic conditions are not conducive and stable enough for a modest rate hike.”
U.S. durable-goods orders and initial-jobless claims all released over the last two days also “support the idea that market conditions will not support the robust demand needs to quickly work off the global supply glut,” he said. But the Federal Open Market Committee’s decision Wednesday to leave interest rates unchanged dragged the greenback lower, which limited any losses for crude futures Thursday. Oil business is mainly conducted in dollars so a depreciation of the currency makes oil attractive for foreign buyers.
The ICE U.S. Dollar Index was down 0.3%, trading around 0.6% lower week to date.
Week to date, WTI crude has lost 6.8%, while and Brent is down 5.3% as a growing surplus of gasoline fuels fears that demand for crude will languish in the coming months.