Fuel

Oil hovered near $40 a barrel in New York as investors weighed a resurgence in the coronavirus against signs of rebounding demand.

The U.S. Treasury Department levied sanctions on Mexican trading company Libre Abordo SA de CV for buying Venezuelan oil via oil-for-humanitarian-aid agreements with the embattled country.

The Transportation and Infrastructure Committee in the U.S. House continued to debate a five-year, $494 billion highway policy bill on June 18, a day after kicking off the measure’s consideration.

Volkswagen has boosted its stake by $200 million in a San Jose, Calif., company that targets solid state battery technology, and the two partners are looking at setting up a pilot plant.

Zero-emission truck maker Nikola Corp., which recently jumped to a publicly traded company from its startup perch, has begun building prototypes of its heavy-duty battery-electric model in Germany and is set for groundbreaking on a plant in the United States this summer.

Three OPEC members identified by their peers as failing to bring production down to target levels in May appear to have begun improving their compliance in June, if lower exports are any indication. But for the biggest overproducer, Iraq, that first step is a small one.

The national average price of diesel has increased seven-tenths of a cent to $2.403, according to the Energy Information Administration.

Many investors, including those using financial data terminals such as Bloomberg’s, were seeing something very different — that Tesla still had to gain more than $25 billion in market value to surpass Toyota.

Oil fell again as a fresh coronavirus outbreak in China, and increases in cases elsewhere, spurred concerns that a second wave of the virus will derail a nascent economic recovery.

Yet another Texas terminal is preparing to export oil, even as the pandemic continues to hammer global demand for U.S. crude.