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London (awp/afp) – Oil prices fell on Wednesday after initial data showing an increase in oil stocks in the United States, when gas prices rose in Europe.
Around 09:45 GMT (11:45 CET), the price of a barrel of Brent from the North Sea for delivery in July fell 0.57% to 83.23 dollars.
Its American equivalent, the barrel of West Texas Intermediate (WTI) for delivery the same month, which is the first day of use as a reference contract, lost 0.58% to 79.34 dollars.
The two global crude benchmarks are falling “due to bearish US oil statistics”, note DNB analysts.
The federation of professionals in the sector, API, estimated Tuesday that crude stocks had climbed by around 2.5 million barrels for the week ended May 17, and those of gasoline by 2.1 million.
For DNB, These “figures are bearish, with increases (in reserves) for both crude and gasoline”.
Analysts, for their part, are counting on a drop in stocks of crude oil and gasoline.
Investors are now awaiting the publication of the weekly report from the US Energy Information Administration (EIA) on the state of oil stocks.
On the natural gas side, the Dutch TTF futures contract, considered the European benchmark, traded at 33.00 euros per megawatt hour (MWh), shortly after reaching 33.94 euros, a one-month high.
“In recent weeks, storage levels in Europe (have) lost the comfortable lead they had compared to the previous year,” comments Barbara Lambrecht, analyst at Commerzbank.
They are now “almost on par with the levels of the previous year” at the same period, she specifies.
Gas reserves are in fact approximately 67% full on average in European Union countries, according to the European Agregated Gas Storage Inventory (AGSI) platform.
In this context, several events are pushing prices upwards.
“Norway had to significantly reduce its deliveries due to maintenance work” and “China imported much more LNG in April than the previous year”, mentions Ms. Lambrecht in particular.
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