Oil prices fell on Friday, erasing an earlier rise but still leaving both benchmarks on track for their biggest weekly gains since early June on the back of supply cuts caused by a storm in the Gulf of Mexico and a strike of offshore workers in Norway.
Brent LCOc1 was down 31 cents at $43.03 a barrel by 1219 GMT. U.S. West Texas Intermediate (WTI) crude CLc1 fell 34 cents to $40.85. Both contracts are on track for weekly gains of about 10% this week, the first rise in three weeks. Brent’s six-month contango, a market structure where the front-month Brent futures are trading at a discount to later contracts implying current oversupply, has shrunk to around $1.90 a barrel from $3.24 less than a month ago.
Norwegian oil company and labour officials said they would meet with a state-appointed mediator on Friday in an attempt to bring an end to a strike. An escalation could almost triple the existing outage if no solution is reached by Oct. 14, taking the total capacity cut to about 934,000 barrels of oil equivalents per day.
