Oil prices fall amid rising crude inventories

Oil prices fell on Wednesday in Asia after the American Petroleum Institute (API) reported that US oil inventories rose last week.

The API said that crude inventories rose by about 600,000 for the week ended Oct. 25.

In the previous week to Oct. 18, the API’s snapshot suggested a crude build even larger than the 2.2 million barrels that analysts expected in the EIA report. In the end, the official number was a drawdown of 1.7 million barrels.

The API data were cited as headwind for oil prices today.

US Crude Oil WTI Futures dropped 0.5% to $55.28 by 1:10 AM ET (05:10 GMT). International Brent Oil Futures fell 0.9% to $61.06.

Analysts now expect that the Energy Information Administration’s government data to show a rise of 494,000 in crude inventories tomorrow.

Oil prices were also dampened by lower demand growth for 2019 and 2020 anticipated by the International Energy Agency (IEA).

While noting that demand rose by 800,000 barrels a day in July and 1.4 million barrels a day in August, the IEA has lowered its forecast for demand growth in 2019 by 100,000 barrels per day to around 1 million bpd and reduced its forecast for 2020 by the same amount to 1.2 million bpd.