SULAIMANI (ESTA) — Oil prices rose on Thursday as investors adjusted positions ahead of an OPEC+ decision over supply policy.
Brent crude futures rose 87 cents to $69.74 by 0605 GMT, having eased 0.5% in the previous session.
U.S. West Texas Intermediate (WTI) crude futures gained 83 cents to $66.40 per barrel, after a 0.9% drop on Wednesday.
“Investors unwound their positions ahead of the OPEC+ decision as oil prices have declined so fast and so much over the past week,” Reuters quoted Tsuyoshi Ueno, senior economist at NLI Research Institute, as saying.
Oil prices have lost more $10 a barrel since last Thursday, when news of Omicron shook investors.
OPEC and its allies including Russia, together known as OPEC+, will likely to decide on Thursday whether to release more oil into the market as previously planned or restrain supply.
Iraqi oil minister Ihsan Abdul Jabbar said on Wednesday he expected the group to agree on extending its current production policies over the short term.
Russia and Saudi Arabia, the biggest OPEC+ producers, had said ahead of this week’s meetings that there was no need for a knee-jerk reaction to amend policy.
Since August, the group has been adding an additional 400,000 barrels per day (bpd) of output to global supply, as it gradually winds down record cuts agreed in 2020, when demand cratered because of the pandemic.
