Investing.com - Crude prices showed a mild fall in Asia on Friday after a manufacturing survey from China with details of an OPEC curb on output yet to filter fully through and investors in the near term awaiting rig count data in the U.S.
Crude oil for November delivery on the New York Mercantile Exchange fell 0.31% to $47.68 a barrel. Brent oil for December delivery on the ICE Futures Exchange in London eased 0.44% to $49.59.
Oilfield services provider Baker Hughes said last week that the number of rigs drilling for oil in the U.S. last week rose by 2 to 418, marking the 12th increase in 13 weeks.
In Asia, the Caixin manufacturing PMI for September came in at 50.1 as expected with holidays in China next week in focus going forward.
"The readings for the manufacturing PMI over the past three months seem to indicate that the economy has begun to stabilise," Zhengsheng Zhong, director of macroeconomic analysis at Caixin said.
But Zhong cautioned that an increasingly strained fiscal budget could pose a risk to sustainable growth. "Given that the growth rate of fiscal income has slowed recently while expenditures have swung, there is insufficient momentum to drive future economic growth, and there is a risk that industrial output may decline."
The official China manufacturing PMI for September from the National Bureau of Statistics and China Federation of Logistics and Purchasing will be released on Saturday and came in at 50.4 in August which was the highest since October 2014.
Overnight, oil prices retreated during North American hours on Thursday, after surging by as much as 6% a day earlier, as the initial euphoria over a preliminary agreement on oil output faded amid doubts over how OPEC would implement such a plan.
Crude soared on Wednesday after OPEC members surprised the market by agreeing to cut oil output in the first such deal since 2008 in talks held on the sidelines of an energy conference in Algeria. The 14-member bloc, however, deferred the task of finalizing a plan to make those cuts until November.
On Wednesday OPEC reached an agreement to limit production to a range of 32.5 million to 33.0 million barrels per day, a reduction of 0.7%-to-2.2% from its current output of 33.2 million barrels.
However, the market remained skeptical of the deal, pondering how such a plan would be implemented. Some analysts cautioned that the agreement left out crucial details on how much each country will produce.
The 14-member oil group said it will wait until the official OPEC meeting in Vienna on November 30 to finalize the decision, when an invitation to join cuts could also be extended to non-OPEC countries such as Russia.