London — Crude oil futures were supported during the early morning trading session in Europe Tuesday in expectation of a draw in US crude inventories being reported in the next American Petroleum Institute data release, due later in the day.
At 1045 GMT, October ICE Brent crude, the front-month contract, was 67 cents/b higher than Monday's close at $73.28/b, while the September NYMEX WTI crude was up 59 cents/b at $67.79/b.
Ahead of the API release of US weekly crude stocks, analysts surveyed by S&P Global Platts forecast a decline of 1.7 million barrels in the week ending August 10, in light of the healthy product cracks that should have encouraged refiners to raise utilization rates.
Other market estimates pegged a larger drop in stock levels at 2.5 million barrels, ING said in a note Tuesday.
"Meanwhile the market is expecting to see around a 500Mbbls increase in Cushing inventories. If the case, this would be the first weekly increase at Cushing since mid-May," ING added in the note.
The API release is due Tuesday at 2030 GMT, and this will be followed by Energy Information Agency data being released Wednesday.
In other oil data, China's July refinery crude throughput was up 12% year on year to an average 11.96 million b/d, preliminary data released by the National Bureau of Statistics showed Tuesday. July crude throughput was also down 1.7% from June, according to S&P Global Platts calculations, based on NBS data. The decrease was attributed mainly to lower run rates at independent refineries in July.
Independent refineries in Shandong cut their operating rates to a 19-month low of 52.5% in July, around 7 percentage points lower than June, amid heavy maintenance.
On the other hand, state-owned refiners Sinopec, PetroChina, Sinochem and China National offshore Oil Corp. raised their planned average refinery run rate to 80% of nameplate capacity in July, up from 79% in June, according to a Platts survey earlier.
In other financial markets, the dollar index was down 0.01% at 96.15. In equities markets, the S&P 500 was down 0.40% and the FTSE 100 up 0.05%.
