Investing.com - Crude prices were quoted flat to higher in Asia on Friday with trade thin as Chian starts week-long Lunar New Year holidays and other markets shut as well.
Global benchmark Brent crude was quoted flat at $56.24 a barrel on London's Intercontinental Exchange, while U.S. crude on the New York Mercantile Exchange rose 0.15% to $53.86 a barrel.
At the end of the week, oilfield services firm Baker Hughes will give its estimates of the number of rigs drilling for oil and gas in the U.S. Data released last week showed U.S. drillers added 29 rigs, the most in almost four years by the end of the previous week, taking the total count up to 551, the most since November 2015. U.S. oil production has risen by more than 6 percent since mid-2016, though it remains 7 percent below the 2015 peak, and is back to levels of late 2014 when oil started a sharp drop from above $100 a barrel.
The higher production is spurred by price gains since the launch this year of a coordinated six-month global deal to curb crude oil supplies to the market by nearly 1.8 million barrels per day by OPEC and key non-OPEC nations led by Russia. Ministers said that 1.5 million barrels a day of the roughly 1.8 million in cuts pledged by OPEC and non-OPEC countries have already been taken out of the market.
Overnight, crude prices staged a rally in the U.S. on Thursday to settle at sharply higher as investors took note of a rally in share markets this week with the Dow crossing 20,000 that aided sentiment.
Demand hopes were lifted by a flurry of executive actions on immigration and regulations that affect business by President Donald Trump helped lift the Dow Jones index above 20,000 on Wednesday, including clearing the way for TransCanada to build the Keystone XL pipeline and for Energy Transfer Partners to build the final portion of the Dakota Access pipeline.