Oil Rises to Top $95 a Barrel
Oil rose 65 cents Thursday, rebounding from earlier declines to finish the trading day at $95.42 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange, Bloomberg reported.
Crude futures had risen $2.28 Tuesday and $1.88 Wednesday, putting the three-day increase at $4.81, Bloomberg said.
Meanwhile, some oil being released by the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve to bring down prices may be held by traders for later sale rather than sent directly to refiners for processing into gasoline or other fuels, Bloomberg reported.
The Department or Energy is offering 30 million barrels oil from the SPR, half the 60 million barrels to be released by International Energy Agency member nations to make up for the loss of Libyan oil exports during the civil conflict.
Oil traders can profit from buying the oil and selling more valuable contracts for later delivery, if the SPR oil is sold at a big enough discount to cover storage costs, Bloomberg said.
Oil inventories fell 4.4 million barrels last week, the Department of Energy reported Wednesday, a bigger drop than the 1.5 million-barrel decline forecast by economists, Bloomberg reported.
Gasoline stockpiles fell 1.4 million barrels, while distillates, which include diesel, rose 260,000 barrels for the week ended Saturday, DOE said in its weekly inventory report.
