Crude Oil Futures Flat As Traders Focus on Tepid Demand

By Nicole Friedman 

NEW YORK--Oil prices traded near flat Monday as traders continued to focus more on tepid demand than on unrest in various geopolitical hot spots.

Light, sweet crude for September delivery recently fell a penny to $97.87 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange. Brent crude on ICE Futures Europe rose 6 cents, or 0.1%, to $104.90 a barrel.

U.S. prices posted their largest weekly decline last week since January, after a refinery in Kansas shut down for up to four weeks following a fire. The refinery buys oil from Cushing, Okla., a key storage hub where supplies have been unusually low this summer, which has boosted prices. Reduced demand for oil from Cushing due to the refinery outage "certainly helps to mitigate the draws at Cushing," said Morgan Stanley in a note Monday.

Two pipelines are set to open this fall to ship oil from the northern U.S. and Canada into Cushing, which could also increase supplies there, the bank noted.

Speculative traders, including hedge funds, pension funds and managed-money funds, took on record-high bets on rising U.S. and global oil prices last month after an insurgency broke out in Iraq, prompting fears of a large supply disruption.

Now those traders may be closing out their bets, pushing prices lower, analysts said.

"The price slide is doubtless attributable to the withdrawal of financial investors," said Commerzbank in a note Monday.

Brent, the global benchmark, is trading near its lowest price for the year. Despite violence in the Iraq, Ukraine, Libya and elsewhere, oil supplies remain ample, and demand from European and Asian refineries has been low. "The downside price acceleration seen last week appears to have significant room to run on a combination of [technical factors], a broad-based reduction in risk appetite and a growing awareness that major geopolitical issues such as the Ukraine, Gaza, Libya, Syria, Iraq, etc., are not making a dent in crude production or exports," said energy-advisory firm Ritterbusch Associates in a note Monday.

Front-month September reformulated gasoline blendstock, or RBOB, recently fell 1.11 cents, or 0.4%, to $2.7329 a gallon. September diesel rose 0.77 cent, or 0.3%, to $2.8738 a gallon.

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