Investing.com - Crude prices held weaker in Asia on Wednesday after industry figures showed a major build in U.S. crude stockpiles.
Crude oil for December delivery on the New York Mercantile Exchange dropped 1.30% to $49.31 a barrel. Brent oil for December delivery on the ICE Futures Exchange in London fell 1.12% to $50.22 a barrel.
The American Petroleum Institute (API) said late Tuesday that crude inventories rose 4.8 million barrels last week, larger than expected, and following a 3.8 million draw the previous week. Stocks at Cushing eased 2.3 million barrels, API said, as an outage of a pipeline feeding the facility continues to crimp flows. Gasoline inventories recorded a build of 1.7 million barrels, and distillates fell 900,000 barrels.
Official data from the Energy Information Administration will be released Wednesday, amid forecasts for an oil-stock increase of 800,000 barrels.
Overnight, oil prices were under pressure in North American trade on Tuesday, reversing earlier gains as fading expectations of a coordinated production cut among major global oil producers and a stronger U.S. dollar weighed.
Iraq, the second biggest producer in OPEC after Saudi Arabia, recently said it wanted to be exempt from any output freeze deal among major global producers.
Global oil prices have been under pressure in recent days amid market skepticism over the implementation of a planned deal by OPEC to limit production.
The 14-member oil group reached an agreement to cap output to a range of 32.5 million to 33.0 million barrels per day in talks held on the sidelines of an energy conference in Algeria late last month.
However, OPEC said it won’t finalize details on individual output quotas until its next official meeting in Vienna on November 30, when an invitation to join the deal could also be extended to non-OPEC countries such as Russia.