Oil Trades Near $36 After Bigger-Than-Expected Jump in Supplies

By Christian Schmollinger

Feb. 12 (Bloomberg) -- Crude oil traded near $36 a barrel after dropping to the lowest in four weeks yesterday as a U.S. government report showed a bigger-than-expected increase in inventories.

Supplies rose 4.72 million barrels to 350.8 million barrels last week, the Energy Department said. Stockpiles were forecast to climb 2.75 million barrels, according to a Bloomberg News survey. U.S. refiners operated at 81.6 percent of capacity last week, the lowest since the period ended Oct. 3 when the Gulf Coast was recovering from two hurricanes, the report showed.

“You’ve got a lot of plants shut down for maintenance and the crude continues to pile up,” said Jonathan Kornafel, a director for Asia at options traders Hudson Capital Energy in Singapore. “The build has a lot to do with the low refinery usage right now.”

Crude oil for March delivery was at $36.02 a barrel, up 8 cents, at 10:20 a.m. Sydney time on the New York Mercantile Exchange. Yesterday, oil fell $1.61, or 4.3 percent, to $35.94 a barrel in New York , the lowest settlement since Jan. 15.

Oil has declined 19 percent this year and dropped 61 percent from a year earlier.

U.S. crude oil inventories have gained in 18 of the past 20 weeks, leaving stockpiles 16 percent higher than the five-year average for the period, the department said yesterday.

Contango Deepens

The price of oil for delivery in April is more than $6 a barrel higher than for March, up from $4.59 last week. December futures are more than $17 above the front month, compared with $13.90 last week.

Prices for delivery in future months are higher than for earlier ones, a situation known as contango, allowing buyers to profit from hoarding oil.

Supplies at Cushing, Oklahoma, where West Texas Intermediate oil traded on Nymex is stored, climbed 1.7 percent to 34.9 million barrels last week, the highest since at least April 2004, when the department began keeping records for the location.

“WTI seems to be in a world of its own right now with these stock builds and that needs to stop or else you’ll continue to see this sharp contango,” said Hudson Capital’s Kornafel.

U.S. refinery utilization dropped 1.9 percentage points from the prior week, the Energy Department said. Analysts forecast that there would be no change.

Companies often shut refinery units for maintenance in January and February as attention shifts away from heating oil and before gasoline use rises.

Gasoline Stockpiles

Gasoline inventories fell 2.66 million barrels to 217.6 million, the biggest drop since September. A 500,000 barrel increase was forecast, according to the median of 15 analyst responses in the Bloomberg News survey.

Gasoline futures for March delivery climbed 2.59 cents, or 2.1 percent, to $1.2698 a gallon in New York yesterday.

Brent crude oil for March settlement was at $44.65 a barrel, up 37 cents, on London’s ICE Futures Europe exchange at 9:54 a.m. Singapore time. The contract expires today. The more-active April future was at $45.78 a barrel, up 46 cents, at 9:28 a.m. Singapore time.

The International Energy Agency, in its report yesterday, cut its global oil-demand forecast for 2009, projecting consumption will decline by 1 million barrels a day as the global economic slowdown deepens, the biggest drop since 1982.

The IEA, which advises 28 developed nations on energy policy, trimmed its 2009 forecast by 570,000 barrels from last month to 84.7 million a day because of a weaker outlook from the International Monetary Fund.

To contact the reporter on this story: Christian Schmollinger in Singapore at christian.s@bloomberg.net