Investing.com - Crude prices staged a rally in the U.S. on Thursday to settle at sharply higher as investors took note of a rally in share markets and looked ahead to U.S. rig count figures on Friday to set the tone.
Global benchmark Brent crude soared 2.11% to $56.24 a barrel on London's Intercontinental Exchange, while U.S. crude on the New York Mercantile Exchange jumped 1.95% to $53.78 a barrel.
At the end of the week, oilfield services firm Baker Hughes will give its estimates of the number of rigs drilling for oil and gas in the U.S. Data released last week showed U.S. drillers added 29 rigs, the most in almost four years by the end of the previous week, taking the total count up to 551, the most since November 2015. U.S. oil production has risen by more than 6 percent since mid-2016, though it remains 7 percent below the 2015 peak, and is back to levels of late 2014 when oil started a sharp drop from above $100 a barrel.
The higher production is spurred by price gains since the launch this year of a coordinated six-month global deal to curb crude oil supplies to the market by nearly 1.8 million barrels per day by OPEC and key non-OPEC nations led by Russia. Ministers said that 1.5 million barrels a day of the roughly 1.8 million in cuts pledged by OPEC and non-OPEC countries have already been taken out of the market.
Overnight, crude prices gained in Asia on Thursday as investors turned attention noted the dollar index, the greenback against a basket of currencies, was down below 100, a level crossed and held for most of the two months since the U.S. presidential election. The index rebounded to 100.48 on Thursday in the U.S.
Demand hopes were lifted by a flurry of executive actions on immigration and regulations that affect business by President Donald Trump helped lift the Dow Jones index above 20,000 on Wednesday, including clearing the way for TransCanada to build the Keystone XL pipeline and for Energy Transfer Partners to build the final portion of the Dakota Access pipeline.