Oil futures ended at a six-week low on Friday as OPEC plans to reduce production appear on the verge of collapse, according to Bloomberg MarketWatch.
December West Texas Intermediate crude fell 59 cents, or 1.3%, to settle at $44.07 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange, after tapping a low of $43.57. Futures lost 9.5% for the week, which marked the largest weekly percentage loss since mid-January.
January Brent crude, the global benchmark, fell 77 cents, or 1.7%, to end trading at $45.58 a barrel on the London ICE Futures Exchange, marking the lowest settlement since early September. For the week, prices were down by more than 10%.
Prices fell sharply after Reuters reported that Saudi Arabia threatened to raise its oil production if Iran refused to cap its output.
“If we don’t get a deal we could see a resumption of the production war,” said Phil Flynn, senior market analyst at Price Futures Group.
OPEC output hit a record 34.02 million barrels a day in October, led by a 400,000 barrel-per-day increase from Libya, Nigeria and Iran, according to a recent Bloomberg News survey.
Meanwhile, December natural gas dropped less than 0.1% and settled at $2.767 per million British thermal units on the New York Mercantile Exchange. For the week, natural gas was down 10.9%, pressured by healthy U.S. inventory levels ahead of the winter heating demand season.
