Fueling Strategy: Please fill up before heading to the house for Thanksgiving (go in full of fuel), Thursday AM wholesale prices will go UP 2.5 cents, Friday AM wholesale prices will have little to no change – Have a great Thanksgiving!!
NYMEX Crude $ 43.04 UP $.1700
NY Harbor ULSD $1.4027 UP $.0030
NYMEX Gasoline $1.3961 UP $.0059
NEWS
Oil futures shook off concerns about a global surplus to end modestly higher in preholiday trade Wednesday, buoyed by a smaller-than-expected rise in crude-oil inventories and a further decline in the number of U.S. oil rigs.
On the New York Mercantile Exchange, light, sweet crude futures for delivery in January rose 17 cents, or 0.4%, to close at $43.04 a barrel, after trading as low as $41.72 earlier in the session. January Brent crude on London’s ICE Futures exchange gained 5 cents a barrel, or 0.1%, to finish at $46.17 a barrel. Oil turned positive just ahead of the closing bell, with traders citing apparent short covering ahead of the Thanksgiving Day holiday. U.S. financial markets will be closed Thursday. Earlier, crude trimmed losses after oil-field-services firm Baker Hughes said the number of active U.S. oil rigs fell by 9 in the latest week to 555. The number of rigs has fallen by 1,017 since the same time last year.
Oil was also boosted after the Energy Information Administration said U.S. crude oil inventories rose 961,000 barrels last week. Analysts surveyed by The Wall Street Journal had expected a 1.1 million barrel rise, on average. The rise was also smaller than the 2.6 million barrel increase reported late Tuesday by the American Petroleum Institute, an industry group.
Separately, the EIA said natural gas in storage rose by 9 billion cubic feet to 4.009 billion cubic feet. Analysts surveyed by oil-data firm Platts had forecast a rise of 4 billion to 8 billion cubic feet. Concerns about heavy crude supplies are still likely to keep a lid on the market and could force a retest of six-year lows below $40 a barrel in coming weeks, barring another flare-up in geopolitical tensions, said Eugene McGillan, senior analyst at Tradition Energy. While U.S. crude oil production has fallen, the decline has slowed recently. With other major oil producers continuing to pump aggressively, it’s unlikely the market will balance supply and demand until there is a meaningful drop in North American output, McGillan said. Crude prices climbed nearly 3% Tuesday on fears of a supply disruption after Turkey shot down a Russian jet fighter along the Syrian border.
Natural gas futures shook off a larger-than-expected rise in U.S. supplies to end higher on expiration day for the December contract which rose 0.6 cent, or 0.3%, to $2.206 per million British thermal units. The EIA said 9 billion cubic feet of natural gas was added to storage in the week ended Nov. 20, topping forecasts.
Oil prices have remained suppressed since the summer of 2014, dropping to levels previously seen during the financial crisis. Most analysts say unless major oil producers, particularly those in the Saudi Arabia-led Organization of the Exporting Petroleum Countries, reverse their “no-cut” strategy to trim output, prices will likely remain weak.