LONDON: Oil prices advanced on Wednesday as US output continued to suffer from the aftereffects of Hurricane Ida last week and Libyan exports were disrupted by protesters.

Brent crude gained 1.1 percent to $72.47 at 6.37 p.m. Riyadh time, while WTI, the US benchmark, added 1.3 percent to $69.25.

About 80 percent of US Gulf production remained offline on Tuesday, with 79 production platforms still unoccupied, according to Reuters. About 17.5 million barrels of output has been lost thus far. The Gulf’s offshore wells make up about 17 percent of US output.

In Libya, protesters blocked oil exports at the ports of Es Sider and Ras Lanuf, an oil engineer at each port said, although other engineers said production at fields that supply the terminals was unaffected.

Globally, demand for gasoline is picking up as motorists get back behind the wheel with the resumption of the school run among other factors.

Kilometers traveled in Italy, Spain, Brazil, Chile and Mexico are all above the equivalent week in 2019, some of them for many weeks in a row, according to Atlantia Group, which operates those roads, Bloomberg reported.

The reading for France was 1.6 percent below 2019’s level, compared with a deficit of as much as 47 percent in early April, Atlantia’s traffic measurements show.

Separate government data for the US and UK show passenger car miles were between 5 percent and 2 percent below pre-pandemic levels, similar to recent weeks, while gasoline demand in those countries was 1 percent above and 4 percent below, respectively.

Researchers from University College London said even more of the world’s oil, gas and coal need to be left in the ground than previously estimated if the planet is to meet Paris Climate Agreement goals to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.
They now calculate that nearly 60 percent of the world’s oil and gas reserves and 90 percent of the coal reserves need to stay in the ground by 2050 to meet the Paris climate goals.