The price of Petroleum Texas Intermediate (WTI) rose 3.6% on Wednesday to $104.25 a barrel, while natural gas rose 4.8% to a level not seen since 2008.
According to data at the end of operations in the New York Mercantile Exchange (Nymex), the WTI futures contracts for delivery in May added 3.65 dollars with respect to the previous close.
The Petroleum benchmark in the United States recovered yesterday the level of 100 dollars and continued to rise today, in parallel with other fuelsdue to the prospect of a tight market in the coming months.
The Texas has risen almost 40% since the beginning of the year and the trend seems to be reinforced by the risk that the war in Ukraine will intensify after the threat of bombing kyiv by Russia.
In fact, investors ignored the data released today by the United States Government on commercial crude oil reserves, which increased by 9.4 million barrels in the last week.
The market also reacted to worse-than-expected economic data from China, one of the main consumers of crude oil.
Trade between China and the rest of the world slowed its year-on-year growth rate in March to 5.8% due to the contraction in imports, its government reported.
In addition, this Wednesday the International Energy Agency revised downwards its forecasts for world demand for crude oil, as the OPEC group did yesterday.
Meanwhile, gasoline contracts due in May rose nearly 14 cents to $3.29 a gallon.
