Oil futures thrust closer to $50 a barrel on Tuesday, reaching their highest settlement since early October after receiving confirmation that crude inventories were rapidly depleting, according to Bloomberg MarketWatch.
June West Texas Intermediate crude ended at $48.31 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange after posting a gain of 59 cents, or 1.2%.
July Brent crude rose 31 cents, or 0.6%, on London’s ICE Futures Exchange and settled at $49.28 a barrel.
Oil prices soared after the American Petroleum Institute disclosed that U.S. crude inventories fell by 1.1 million barrels. Analysts anticipate a drop of 3 million barrels in oil inventories in the near future.
“Supply outages continue to be the key short-term driver for the crude complex, with Canadian and Nigerian production still facing difficulty,” said Robbie Fraser, commodity analyst at Schneider Electric.
The U.S. Energy Information Administration announced on Tuesday that “it projects a decline in domestic oil output to 8.6 million barrels a day in 2017, from 9.4 million barrels a day in 2015, mainly because of a decline in prices.”
Meanwhile, June natural gas tacked on 1.9 cents, or 0.9%, settling at $2.048 per million British thermal units.
