On Thursday, during the morning trading session on the US stock exchanges, oil prices rose, recovering the decline in the last session. Market players focus on safe assets, despite a sharp increase in US oil inventories.
WTI futures for March delivery on the New York Mercantile Exchange jumped $ 1.03, or 2%, to $ 53.79 a barrel, after falling $ 0.43, or 0.8% a day earlier. On Wednesday, WTI crude oil fell $ 0.36, or 0.7%.
Brent futures for March delivery on the London Mercantile Exchange ICE Futures Exchange rose $ 1.22 or 2.2% to $ 56.30 per barrel.
The weekly report of the US Energy Department's Energy Information (EIA) says that crude oil inventories in the US rose last week by 2.9 million barrels to 488.3 million barrels.
Last month, the price of oil futures fluctuated in a narrow range around $ 0.5 due to the constant change of market sentiment on the news between the recovery of shale oil in the United States and OPEC production cut.
Since mid-2016, the number of drilling rigs in the US increased by more than 6%, returning to the level of the end of 2014. This reinforces concerns that increasing production in the US shale oil can neutralize the efforts of other producers to find a profitable balance between oil supply and demand in the world markets.
Oil producers have made a serious cut in production to eliminate overproduction and support prices during the first agreement in more than ten years between OPEC and non-OPEC countries.
Production has already decreased by 1.5 million barrels per day from the planned overall cut by 1.8 million barrels per day.
On NYMEX, gasoline futures for February rose $ 0.001 or 0.1% to $ 1.529 a gallon, while heating oil prices for February delivery increased by $ 0.027 or 1.7% to $ 1.639 per gallon.
March futures for natural gas increased by $ 0.111 or 3.3% to a maximum of $ 3.457 a week for one million British thermal units (BTU).