Adedapo Adesanya
By Adedapo Adesanya
Oil prices appreciated on Thursday night after earlier it looked like they might be heading downward but started gains as the Pentagon announced that it would deploy equipment and personnel in support of Saudi Arabia following attacks on its oil facilities earlier this month.
Oil futures had suffered from steeper declines for much of Thursday’s session, before the news broke in the minutes before the settlement.
At 3 p.m. (Nigerian Time) on Thursday, WTI Crude was down at $56.27 and Brent Crude was trading down at $61.16.
However by 10 p.m, prices rose as Brent Crude gained 22 Cents or 0.36 percent to trade at $61.65 per barrel while the US West Texas Intermediate (WTI) gained 3 Cents or 0.05 percent to trade at $56.52.
According to a press release by on Thursday, the US Department of Defense will deploy one “patriot battery, four sentinel RADARs [and] approximately 200 support personnel” to Saudi Arabia.
Analysts noted that this move by the US military to support Saudi Arabia put an end to the unwinding of the risk premium that had followed the drone attack on Saudi Arabia’s plants on September 14, 2019.
Business Post reported on Wednesday that Saudi Arabia had restored output capacity to 11.3 million barrels a day, more quickly than initially planned, after attacks on facilities earlier this month knocked production of more than 5 million barrels a day offline, leading to a spike in crude prices.
