Oil Prices Extend Weekly Surge as Supply Risks Bolster Sentiment

Investing.com – Oil prices added to strong weekly gains on Friday as market participants placed bets that supply concerns would outweigh and attempt by producers to increase production.

New York-traded gained 77 cents, or about 1.1%, to $74.22 a barrel by 10:55AM ET (14:55GMT).

Meanwhile, , the benchmark for oil prices outside the U.S., traded up $1.42, or 1.8%, to $79.03.

Black gold has been on a tear this week after OPEC and non-OPEC producers agreed on a modest increase in production from next month, without announcing a clear target for the output increase.

The U.S. benchmark has risen more than 8% this week, while Brent is up more than 4%.

As OPEC explained in the joint press release from last Friday, its members had exceeded the required level of conformity to the November 30, 2016 agreement to curb production.

Having reached 152% compliance in May, OPEC agreed last Friday to strive to drop that compliance to 100%.

The cartel noted that there were no specific allocations for individual members, as some countries that did not have spare capacity would be unable to increase output.

Saudi Arabia, the de facto leader of OPEC, said on Saturday the move would translate into a nominal output rise of around 1 million bpd.

However, unplanned supply stoppages from Libya, Venezuela and more recently, an outage at Canada’s Syncrude upgrader that has especially strained North American markets, coupled with U.S. sanctions against OPEC-exporter Iran, are leading traders to bet that the increase in output will be unable to counteract rising demand.

That belief led experts polled by Reuters to up their forecasts for oil prices.

According to the survey of 35 economists and analysts released on Friday, Brent crude will average $72.58 a barrel in 2018, 90 cents higher than the $71.68 forecast in last month’s poll and compared with the $71.15 average so far this year.

The monthly survey sees U.S. crude futures averaging $66.79 a barrel in 2018, compared with $66.47 forecast last month.

Later on Friday, investors will turn their attention to U.S. output with the latest instalment of Baker Hughes’ weekly reading of drilling activity.

Although last week’s reading showed the number of U.S. oil rigs fell for the first time in weeks, the number remains just one rig below the March 2015 high registered the week before.

In other energy trading, jumped 2.2% $2.1474 a gallon by 10:56AM ET (14:56GMT), while gained 1.5% to $2.2111 a gallon.

Lastly, traded down 0.8% to $2.918 per million British thermal units.

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