By Geoffrey Smith
Investing.com -- Crude oil prices rose in early trading in New York on Tuesday as the broad sell-off in risk assets on Monday lost momentum.
By 11:05 AM ET (1705 GMT), U.S. crude futures were up 0.1% at $39.58 a barrel, well off an intraday high earlier of $40.24 a barrel and again struggling to stay in the summer range that had held for three months after OPEC and its allies slashed output in response to the Covid-19 pandemic.
The global benchmark Brent, meanwhile, was up 0.3% at $41.56. likewise well off its intraday high.
U.S. Gasoline RBOB Futures were down 0.9% at $1.1665 a gallon.
U.S. products were keeping to relatively narrow ranges, ahead of the release of U.S. inventory data for last week from the American Petroleum Institute. Analysts expect the government's data, due for release on Wednesday, to show a decline of some 2.5 million barrels in crude stockpiles.
Prices were supported by steadier equity markets, which had fallen sharply on Monday due to concerns about the growth trajectory in Europe and the U.S. The former is seeing more and more local lockdown measures reintroduced in an effort to contain the spread of the coronavirus, while fresh question marks are hanging over the latter as a dispute over filling a Supreme Court vacancy threatens to make a compromise over the next package of fiscal support measures less likely.
Earlier, Reuters had published an interview with Vitol chief executive Russell Hardy, who said that the company doesn’t agree with BP (NYSE:BP) that the pandemic will move up the moment of peak oil demand across the world, although it does now expect that peak to be lower.
“We haven’t revised our 10-year view since COVID,” the agency quoted Hardy as saying. “When we redo the study, we’ll probably come up with lower peak oil demand than before ... but we think Asian demand growth will pull through and take us beyond 2019 in the years to come.”
Elsewhere, Libya’s National Oil Company said the port of Marsa el-Hariga would export a crude cargo by the end of September, the first shipment from the terminal since January. Libya can theoretically produce some 1.2 million barrels a day, of which the majority would be bound for world export markets. How quickly it could return to such levels is unclear, however, given the extent of war damage on its installations, and the willingness of all sides in the civil war to abide by any truce.