WTI has been trading in a tight range roughly between $55 and $57 a barrel for the past two weeks, and prices remained hemmed inside that band most of the session on Tuesday. “The complex remains in a consolidation phase and while today’s push to above yesterday’s $57 highs per nearby WTI offered some solace to the bulls, upside follow through will likely require a decided bullish surprise out of tomorrow’s EIA report,” said analysts at Ritterbusch & Associates in a research note, referring to the U.S. Energy Information Administration’s weekly petroleum status report.
Last week’s EIA data provided just such a surprise, as the administration reported a large and unexpected 8.6-million-barrel decline in U.S. oil inventories for the previous week. But price gains after that report stalled out quickly, leading some analysts to question whether prices may soon fall back toward $50 a barrel. This week’s EIA report is due Wednesday morning, and a survey by The Wall Street Journal indicates crude stockpiles may have risen by 1.6 million barrels last week.
The American Petroleum Institute, an industry group, said late Tuesday that its own data for the week showed a 7.3-million-barrel increase in crude supplies, a 391,000-barrel fall in gasoline stocks and a 3.1-million-barrel decrease in distillate inventories, according to a market participant.