The price of crude oil continued to drop in Friday afternoon trading, falling 51 cents to $35.55 per barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange, the Associated Press reported. London’s International Petroleum Exchange was also reporting lower prices at approximately $35 per barrel, according to reports earlier Friday.
The United States and United Nations continued to push for Israeli and Palestinian leaders to meet again in a summit aimed at bringing peace to the region, which has been extremely volatile in recent days. This, coupled with assurances that most Arab countries do not expect the conflicts to disrupt oil production, have helped eased prices that skyrocketed Thursday in a round of panic buying.
Iraq has now joined the list of countries declaring it would not change its oil exporting policy, an industry source told Reuters. In fact, the source said Iraq plans to boost its oil production and exporting capacity.
More reassurance comes in reports from Venezuela, where despite an ongoing oil workers strike exports remained at normal levels Friday, Bloomberg reported. Venezuela is OPEC’s third-largest oil producer and ships almost 1.3 million barrels of oil to the United States alone each day, the report said.
U.S. government forecasters said Thursday they expect a normal winter, meaning colder temperatures than in the past three winters, which were relatively mild, Bloomberg also reported. This would mean more increases in heating oil and diesel fuel prices, but the announcement has not seemed to cause panic in the oil market.
