oil News Updates

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates — An oil tanker off Saudi Arabia’s port city of Jiddah suffered an explosion early Dec. 14 after being hit by “an external source,” a shipping company said.

Oil just managed a weekly gain as an impasse in Washington over pandemic relief dimmed chances of an imminent boost to demand.

Oil fell from its strongest close in nine months, hampered by weaker risk sentiment in global markets.

Algeria, which this year holds the OPEC presidency, said that both Saudi Arabia and Russia were pressing fellow members to prolong the current oil-supply cuts into next year, rather than tapering them as planned. Algeria supported the proposal, the first country to publicly do so.

Oil extended its rally and hit a two-week high after an explosion at Lebanon’s main port rocked the capital Beirut, pointing to geopolitical instability in the region.

Oil rose the most in nearly two weeks as economic data from the U.S. to Europe and Asia signaled a flicker of life in languishing demand.

Oil headed for a sixth weekly gain after OPEC+ reached a tentative agreement to prolong its record production cuts and U.S. jobs data was better than expected.

The price of oil dropped to its lowest level in history April 20, sinking into negative pricing as oil supplies are beginning to overwhelm the globe’s storage capacity.

The U.S. Energy Department is negotiating with nine companies to rent about 23 million barrels of oil storage capacity in its Strategic Petroleum Reserve as part of a Trump administration bid to help drain the country’s growing glut of crude.

A shipping company was ordered to pay a $1.65 million fine and given four years’ probation after one of its vessels was caught dumping oil bilge water into the Pacific Ocean, a short distance from the Golden Gate Bridge.