Oil prices opened clearly below $25 a barrel on Tuesday, struggling to regain ground lost during heavy selling late in the previous session.
A barrel of Brent North Sea reference crude for February delivery opened at $24.75, after closing at $24.43 on Monday. The price fell by a dollar in the last hour of trading amid strong profit-taking.
In New York, the light sweet crude February contract ticked up 18 cents on Monday to $28.13 a barrel. The OPEC basket price of global cruds fell to $23.30 on Monday from $23.51 on Friday, the OPECNA agency reported.
Analyst said the market weakness was largely due to technical selling, and added that the market would need fresh pledges of output cuts from the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) for prices to trend higher.
OPEC countries are considered likely to agree an output cut of 1.5 million barrels a day at a Vienna meeting next week, but the market wants more, analysts said.
"Most of the selling (on Monday) was attributed to profit taking and technical factors," said Lawrence Eagles, an analyst with the GNI brokerage.
"But there was also a feeling that with a 1.5-million-barrels-per-day OPEC output cut practically signed and sealed in market psyche, it was felt there was little fresh news from the carel that would emerge to support prices," Eagles said in a research note.
Some OPEC members such as Iran, Iraq and Qatar have called for production to be slashed by as much as two million barrels to give a lift to prices, which have tumbled from 10-year high points above $35 a barrel touched in October.—AFP.
©--Agence France Presse.
© 2001 Mena Report (www.menareport.com)
