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Oil prices fall

25 February 2010 08:36 (UTC +04:00)

Baku â€“ APA-Economics. Crude futures Thursday fell below $80 in Asian trading after the U.S. dollar strengthened against the euro and high oil inventories curbed investors’ appetite, Market Watch reports.

On the New York Mercantile Exchange, light, sweet crude futures for delivery in April traded at $79.70 a barrel at 0651GMT, down 30 cents in the Globex electronic session. April Brent crude on London’s ICE Futures exchange fell 21 cents to $77.88 a barrel.

Oil inventories rose by 3 million barrels in the week ended Feb. 19, a steeper build than the 1.9 million barrels anticipated by analysts in a Dow Jones Newswires survey.

As strikes by workers at Total SA’s (TOT) French refineries have stabilized and the U.S. dollar is still near fresh highs, oil bulls will find it increasingly difficult to keep "a bullish case alive," with any further rise "heavily contingent upon additional stock market gains," Ritterbusch said.

Distillate inventories, including heating oil and diesel, fell 600,000 barrels, half the anticipated decline. Gasoline inventories tightened, however, falling 900,000 barrels compared with analysts’ expectations of a 500,000-barrel increase.