Around 4:45 p.m. GMT (5:45 p.m. in Paris), the price of a barrel of Brent from the North Sea for delivery in February, which is the first day of use as a benchmark contract, advanced 2.98% to 71.29 dollars.

In New York, a barrel of West Texas Intermediate (WTI) for the month of January gained 2.84% to 68.06 dollars.

These two contracts, which had lost more than 5% the day before, "are recovering while the main producers will try to counter the threat to fuel demand by the Omicron variant", explains Avtar Sandu, analyst at Philip Futures.

The thirteen members of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), led by Saudi Arabia, held on Wednesday by videoconference the first of their two summits scheduled for this week, without any conclusion having been published in its issue.

The decision eagerly awaited by the market, namely the level of production of the cartel at the beginning of next year, will not be known until the end of the second summit on Thursday, which is also attended by its ten allies, via the Opep + agreement, taken by Russia.

"The arrival of the Omicron variant and the fall in prices that followed obviously increase the chances that Opec + will choose to press the pause button," said Helima Croft, of RBC, rather than increasing production by 400,000 barrels. per day as she has been doing every month since May.

The multiplication of health restrictions put in place to counter the spread of the new strain of Covid-19, the dangerousness of which we still do not know, threaten the demand for black gold.

This strategy would also be an attempt to curb somehow a fall in prices unfavorable to the producers' funds, by more than 10% since Thursday evening, despite the current rebound.

Investors also took note on Wednesday of the state of crude oil inventories in the United States last week.

The latter fell less than expected by analysts, according to figures released Wednesday by the US Energy Information Agency (EIA), of the order of 900,000 barrels.

The market is also closely monitoring the Iranian nuclear negotiations which resumed on Monday.

Iran, the historic producer of OPEC, has been excluded from the market since Donald Trump's denunciation in 2018 of the 2015 nuclear agreement, supposed to prevent Tehran from acquiring atomic weapons.

A possible lifting of sanctions would lead to an increase in the cartel's supply in a context that has become more uncertain for demand.

© 2021 AFP