The prices of oil around the world are rising on Wednesday morning amid data from the American Petroleum Institute (API), particularly the decline in black gold reserves in the United States during the previous week. On the contrary, US fuel reserves have grown significantly.

Here, gasoline stocks rose by 3.1 million barrels, against the forecasted growth of 1.8 million and distillates by 1.4 million barrels, against the forecasted decline of 361 thousand barrels.

As for the oil prices, the cost of April futures for the North Sea Brent mixture increased by 0.29%, that is, to $ 55.8 per barrel, while March futures rose by 0.34%, equivalent to $ 56.1 per barrel. At the same time, the price of March futures for WTI crude oil also rose by 0.38%, namely to $ 52.81 per barrel.

Before API reported that the United States' oil reserves suddenly declined by 5.3 million barrels, analysts already predicted that there will be an increase of 430 thousand barrels. According to the American Petroleum Institute, US oil reserves fell by 3.5 million barrels at the distribution center in Cushing Oklahoma. This evening, the official data on stocks will be published by the US Department of Energy. According to experts' forecasts, the Ministry of Energy will report an increase of 0.4 million barrels.

An additional impulse for the growth of the oil market was the statistics on COVID-19 cases in China – the largest oil importing country in the world. So, the daily increase in coronavirus cases in that country exceeded 100 in the middle of this month, which happened for the first time since mid-2020. Afterwards, the indicator went below this level for the second day in a row. There is no doubt that such data will have a positive impact on expectations for the demand for black gold.

Today, experts believe that it is quite difficult for the oil's market participants to make a final short-term shift upwards to another price level. A serious obstacle here is the strong uncertainty in the short-term demand forecast.