A weaker dollar and lower U.S. crude oil production for last week are pushing oil prices up this week to their seventh consecutive trading session in the black, but crude prices have dropped by double digits since the beginning of the year and are set to record their worst first-half performance since the first half of 1998. At 7:57am EDT on Friday, WTI Crude was trading up 0.73 percent at US$45.26, while Brent Crude was up 0.59 percent to US$47.91. Since OPEC decided last November to act as the market regulator by drawing down the glut, oil prices enjoyed a good run until around the end of the first quarter this year. But then, the market and investors started growing increasingly concerned that the market was not balancing fast enough and that OPEC’s production cuts might not be able to kill the glut by the middle of this year. […]