Crude takes a huge leap

Prices rise more than 11% at one shot

Crude prices shot up on Thursday, 12 March, 2009. Prices rose today as traders mulled over OPEC's forthcoming meeting at Vienna this coming weekend where the cartel is expected to decide another production cut to restore crude prices.

On Thursday, crude-oil futures for light sweet crude for April delivery closed at $47.03/barrel (higher by $4.7 or 11.1%) on the New York Mercantile Exchange. Last week, crude ended higher by 1.7%. For the month of February, crude prices had ended higher by 1.5%.

Prices reached a high of $147 on 11 July, 2008 but have dropped almost 68% since then. Year to date, in 2009, crude prices are higher by 11.3%. On a yearly basis, crude prices are lower by 55%.

OPEC has been trying to cut production consistently in order to step up prices from their current low levels. There has been conflicting reports in the market regarding the fact that OPEC is likely to reduce output in March, 2009. OPEC has already agreed to cut cartel quotas by 4.2 million barrels a day since September, equivalent to about 5% of global oil demand. The cartel is supposed to meet on 15 March, 2009 at Vienna.

Crude had slumped more than 10% in its past two sessions. The EIA had reported yesterday in its weekly inventory report that crude inventories rose by 700,000 million barrels last week. Market had expected a decline of 1 million barrels. As per the report, refinery capacity utilization rate remained low at 82.7%. It also showed that inventories at Cushing, Oklahoma, the delivery point for Nymex futures, fell for a fourth week to $33.6 million barrels.

The EIA report also showed petroleum demand has been falling. Total petroleum products supplies over the past four weeks, including gasoline, jet fuel and diesel, averaged 19.3 million barrels a day, down by 2.1% from a year ago. But gasoline demand over the past four weeks rose by 1.6% from a year ago.

Also at the Nymex on Thursday, April reformulated gasoline rose 7.6% to $1.3457 a gallon and April heating oil gained 8.2% to $1.2264 a gallon.

April natural-gas futures rose 5.2$ to $3.995 per million British thermal units. EIA reported today that U.S. natural-gas inventories fell by 112 billion cubic feet in the week ended 6 March, 2009. At 1,681 billion cubic feet, inventories were 271 billion cubic feet higher than last year at this time and 197 billion cubic feet above the five-year average.

Crude prices had ended FY 2008 lower by 54%, the largest yearly loss since trading began at Nymex