TOKYO- Oil prices rose on Monday after Saudi Arabia’s state-owned oil producer Aramco raised the official selling price for its crude, suggesting demand remains strong at a time of tighter supplies.
Brent crude was up by 90 cents or 1.1 percent at $83.64 a barrel, after dropping nearly 2 percent last week. US oil gained 87 cents or 1.1 percent to $82.14, having declined almost 3 percent through Friday.
Aramco late on Friday raised its December official selling price to Asia for its Arab light crude to $2.70 a barrel versus Oman/Dubai crude, up $1.40 from this month.
The move by Aramco suggests “demand remains strong” as the OPEC producer and other major oil exporters keep the reins on supply, ANZ Research said in a note.
The Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries and allies such as Russia, together known as OPEC+, agreed last week to stick to their plan to raise oil output by 400,000 barrels per day from December.
US President Joe Biden had called on OPEC+ to produce more barrels to dampen rising prices and on Saturday said his administration has “other tools” to deal with the higher price of oil.
Elsewhere, China’s oil imports slumped in October to the lowest in three years, as state-owned refiners withheld purchases due to higher prices, while independent refiners were restrained by limited quotas for bringing in crude.
The world’s biggest crude oil importer brought in 37.8 million tons last month, data from the General Administration of Customs showed on Sunday, equivalent to 8.9 million barrels per day (bpd).
That is down from 9.99 million bpd in September and 10.02 million bpd in the same period last year.
Over the January-October period, crude arrivals totaled 425.06 million tons, or 10.21 million bpd, down 7.2 percent year-on-year, the customs data showed.
Crude imports were down on a monthly basis for a second month and the decline has occurred amid a 62 percent jump in crude oil prices LCOc1 this year as economies open globally from COVID-19 pandemic restrictions, spurring fuel demand.
