Investing.com – Oil prices rose on Tuesday as hundreds of oil workers in Norway were set to strike later in the day, raising concerns of potential supply shortages.
Crude Oil WTI Futures for August delivery were trading at $74.25 a barrel at 12:40AM ET (04:40 GMT), up 0.57%. Brent Oil Futures for September delivery, traded in London, were also up 0.58% at $78.52 per barrel.
Analysts said the strike would likely affect the production of at least one field, Shell’s Knarr, and could potentially adds to disruptions in other oil producers.
Meanwhile, United Araba Emirates Energy Minister Suhail Al Mazrouei said the OPEC and its allies are “doing what they could” to offset crude output shortfalls.
“It’s unfair to say that OPEC is not doing its part,” Al Mazrouei, who’s also serving as president of OPEC, said in an interview with Bloomberg on Tuesday. “There are things outside of our hand, the geopolitics as well as how much production is coming from the shale oil and Canadian sands.”
Al Mazrouei then said OPEC should not shoulder the blame.
“OPEC alone cannot be blamed for all the problems that are happening in the oil industry, but at the same time we were responsive in terms of the measures we took in our latest meeting in June.”
Trump accused OPEC in recent weeks of driving oil prices higher and urged Saudi Arabia to raise supplies to compensate for lower exports from Iran.
Oil prices were under pressure in the previous session as Canada's Syncrude operations are set to resume activity sooner than expected.
Suncor Energy said Monday its Syncrude oil sands project in Canada would resume some production in July, sooner than expected, and hit full capacity in September, following an outage last month that disrupted total output.
This could boost crude supplies across North America at a time when inventories at Cushing, Okla., the delivery point for U.S. crude futures, fell to their lowest level in 3-1/2 years.