Investing.com - Crude oil prices were narrowly mixed on Friday as investors looked ahead to weekly US rig count figures to set the tone.
On the New York Mercantile Exchange crude futures for December delivery rose 0.33% to $55.32 a barrel, while on London's Intercontinental Exchange, Brent lost 0.21% to $61.23 a barrel.
Overnight, crude oil prices settled lower on Thursday as investors fretted over a potential uptick in global supply amid reports that Turkey and Iraq discussed resuming exports from the Kirkuk-Ceyhan pipeline.
A discussion between Iraq and Turkey on resuming Kirkuk oil export from the Ceyhan pipeline sparked fears of oversupply as many said a possible uptick in exports would forced OPEC to rein in production.
“The priority is to resume oil exports from Kirkuk through the Iraqi-Turkish pipeline once it has been rehabilitated or replaced by a new one,” Iraq’s Oil Minister Jabbar al-Luaibi said.
That added to recent fears that rising U.S. production would dampened the impact of Opec’s production cuts, which so far are widely believed to be moving oil markets closer to rebalancing.
Preliminary U.S. production figures showed weekly output rose by 25,000 to an all-time high of 9.65 million barrels per day, as crude oil stockpiles rose for second week in arrow, the Energy Information Administration Energy Agency said.
Inventories of U.S. crude rose by roughly 1.9 million barrels for the week ended Nov. 11, missing expectations of a draw of 2.2 barrels.
Data pointing to rising U.S. output comes ahead of an OPEC meeting on Nov. 30 in Vienna, where it is expected the oil-cartel will extend its output-cut agreement beyond the March 2018 deadline.
In May, Opec producers agreed to extend production cuts for a period of nine months until March, but stuck to production cuts of 1.2 million bpd agreed in November last year.