Oil prices eased on Thursday, taking Brent crude to
a 2018 low, as soaring U.S. output undermined OPEC efforts to tighten markets, although a North Sea pipeline outage and record Chinese imports offered support, Reuters reports.
Brent crude futures LCOc1 were at $65.39 per barrel at 0525 GMT, down 12 cents, or 0.2 percent, from the previous close. Brent slipped to its lowest for the year at $65.12 a barrel early in the session.
U.S. West Texas Intermediate (WTI) crude futures CLc1 were at $61.60 a barrel. That was down 19 cents, or 0.3 percent, from the last settlement, though still some way off its $60.10 2018 low on Jan. 2.
The dips follow bigger falls on
Wednesday, when crude touched one-month lows and erased much of 2018’s early gains.
Some support on Thursday came from the second outage in as many months on the 450,000 barrels per day (
bpd ) Forties pipeline network, Britain’s biggest, which supplies much of the crude underpinning Brent futures, as well as record Chinese January imports of 9.57 million
bpd .
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