Kuwait oil price up 65 cents to USD 27.38 pb

KUWAIT CITY, May 31, (KUNA) : The price of Kuwaiti oil went up by 65 cents to USD 27.38 per barrel Friday, after being at USD 26.73 pb the day before, said the Kuwait Petroleum Corporation (KPC) Saturday.

At the global level, the price of the West Texas Intermediate went up by USD 1.78 to USD 35.49 per barrel, the same case with the price of the Brent crude, which went up by USD 1.81 to USD 37.84 pb.

Meanwhile , Kuwait’s crude oil exports to Japan in April hit a one-year high of 9.57 million barrels, or 319,000 barrels per day (bpd) to become Japan’s thirdbiggest oil provider, government data showed Friday.

Although Kuwait’s crude oil bound for Japan declined 3.2 percent from the same month of 2019, the figure was the highest on daily basis since then, when it recorded 330,000 bpd, the Japanese Natural Resources and Energy Agency said in a preliminary report.

Japan’s overall imports of crude oil declined 9.0 percent year-onyear to 2.76 million bpd for the fourth straight month of drop. Shipments from the Middle East accounted for 90.6 percent of the total, up 1.9 percentage points from the year before, it added.

Saudi Arabia returned to be Japan’s No.1 oil supplier, but imports from the kingdom shrank 6.5 percent from a year earlier to 1.00 million bpd, followed by the United Arab Emirates with 839,000 bpd, up 16.8 percent, the agency said.

Qatar ranked fourth with 205,000 bpd and Ecuador fifth with 76,000 bpd, respectively. Japan is the world’s-third biggest oil consumer after China and the US.