FUTURES MOVERS - Oil firm, but poised to end week lower - Gold futures set to end the week with a gain of 3%
By Myra P. Saefong, CBS.MarketWatch.com cbs.marketwatch.com Last Update: 11:42 AM ET Jan. 24, 2003
NEW YORK (CBS.MW) -- Crude futures inched higher Friday, but will likely post their second down week this month.
Data on U.S. oil supplies failed to reflect an eight-week-old strike in Venezuela, and oil production from the South American country is headed higher.
Crude for March delivery traded at $32.33 a barrel, up 8 cents on the New York Mercantile Exchange. It closed out last week at $32.95.
The week of Jan. 6 was also a down week for crude, but in five out of the last six weeks, the trading range Friday has been positive, said Patrick Patten, an analyst at technical advisory service United Energy.
"Friday seems to be the day where everyone thinks about the war and doesn't want to be short over the weekend," Patten said.
Also on Nymex, gold futures were poised to end the week up about 3 percent. Investors kept the U.S. dollar and stock market in focus and looked toward a briefing next week by U.N. weapons inspectors on Iraq for clues about whether to buy or sell the precious metal. See Metals Stocks.
"Venezuela is supposedly in the process of getting the oil industry back to work, but it is not clear how cooperative the workers are or how long it will take to resume production," said Todd Hultman, president of DailyFutures.com.
Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez's government now claims that daily oil output has surpassed 1 million barrels, while the opposition, which began its labor strike on Dec. 2, says it's running at around 812,000 barrels per day. Venezuela produced around 3 million barrels per day before the strike began.
Either way, traders realize Chavez is beginning to get some production back on line, said Grady Garrett, chief trading strategist at EnergyTrendAlert.com.
News this week indicates some progress on a resolution to the strike. Some of Venezuela's striking oil tanker pilots reportedly returned to work this week following a government deal to receive back wages.
Iraqi focus
Going into the weekend, Hultman said the biggest news for crude continues to be that "the U.S. and U.K. are headed to war with Iraq, and there is probably nothing that can stop it."
President George Bush will likely make his case to the world in his State of the Union address Tuesday, Hultman said, "showing numerous instances where Iraq is in flagrant violation of U.N. agreements, refusing to cooperate in the disarmament process."
Hultman expects the U.S. and its allies to attack Iraq within a month with the cooperation of Iraq's neighbors.
If that happens, crude prices will likely spike up on the initial news, but the White House will likely announce the release of crude inventories from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve "to soothe the market," he said.
Oil supplies rise
Even though Venezuela's strike is about to enter its ninth week, U.S. crude supplies haven't reflected much of any impact from the loss of oil production in the South American country.
Early Thursday, the American Petroleum Institute reported that crude stocks rose by 181,000 barrels to total 272.4 million barrels in the week ended Jan. 17, up from 272.2 million a week earlier.
The Energy Department said inventories of crude climbed 1.5 million barrels to 273.8 million barrels, up from 272.3 million a week earlier.
Most analysts were expecting a decline because of Venezuela's strike. See full story.
In recent action, petroleum-product prices were mixed. February unleaded gasoline rose by 0.19 cent to 90 cents a gallon. February heating oil traded at 91.05 cents a gallon, down 0.48 cent.
Natural gas inches up
Among other energy futures, natural gas futures rose on expectations for a large decline in next week's U.S. supplies. February natural gas rose 4.2 cents to $5.50 per million British thermal units.
Next week, the Energy Department should report another big decline in U.S. natural-gas supplies, analysts at Fimat said in a report, though starting next week, temperatures will be a lot milder.
The National Weather Service is forecasting normal temperatures for the northern two-thirds of the nation from Jan. 28 through Feb. 1, Fimat said.
On Thursday, the Energy Department reported that natural-gas supplies fell by 210 billion cubic feet during the week ended Jan. 17. Total inventories of 1.985 trillion cubic feet are now 537 billion cubic feet below year-ago levels, and 76 billion cubic feet below the five-year average, the government report said. The data surpassed the year-ago decline of 126 billion cubic feet and was on the high-end of most analyst estimates, Fimat said.
Over in the equities arena Friday, the Oil Service Index ($OSX: news, chart, profile) traded down 1.9 percent after gains of the past two sessions.
The Reuters/CRB Index, a broad-based measure of the commodity futures market, traded at 244.1, up 0.3 percent amid gold's rally. Myra P. Saefong is a reporter for CBS.MarketWatch.com in San Francisco.