(LONDON) Oil prices stabilized on Thursday, near seven-year highs reached on Wednesday, pending weekly figures on commercial stocks in the United States published by the US Energy Information Agency (EIA).
Posted at 7:10 a.m.
Around 6 a.m., the price of a barrel of Brent from the North Sea for March maturity lost 0.21% to 88.25 dollars.
In New York, a barrel of West Texas Intermediate (WTI) for February delivery gleaned 0.01% to 85.81 dollars.
On Wednesday, Brent rose to $89.17 a barrel, a new high since October 2014. WTI meanwhile climbed to $87.91, also its highest in seven years.
For Neil Wilson, an analyst at Markets.com, crude prices are “pausing” in a wait-and-see market.
“Last night, the American Petroleum Institute (API) reported an increase in American oil reserves” last week, notes Bjarne Schieldrop, an analyst at SEB, who believes that “this may have weighed a little on the Brent”.
The API data is considered less reliable than the EIA data, which will be released later in the session.
Contrary to the API, analysts expect crude inventories to fall by 1.75 million barrels weekly, and gasoline inventories to rise by 2.6 million barrels, according to the median of a compiled consensus. by Bloomberg.
With a rise of 12% for Brent and 13% for WTI since the start of the year, the market’s thirst for crude is far from quenched.
Some OPEC+ (Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries and its partners) producers are struggling to meet their extraction targets.
And in the United States, shale oil producers invested less during the lean months of the pandemic, adds Edoardo Campanella, analyst at UniCredit.
But thanks to the short duration of their production cycle, the latter “will regain their role as pivotal producers, who open their taps when prices make their activity profitable and close them when this is no longer the case,” he believes. -he.