After a sharply lower open Tuesday, oil stocks clawed their way back to trade near the previous session's close. Natural gas and oil service stocks were less buoyant, however, trending slightly downward amid choppy prices in the commodities market.
By mid-morning, the Amex Oil Index (XOI : 1,480.87, +4.11, +0.3% ) was unchanged at 1,476 points, back from a 0.6% drop at the open. Independent oil company Hess Corp. (HES : 63.66, +1.99, +3.2% ) was leading percentage gainers, up 1.4%, while U.S.-traded shares of Spain's Repsol SA (REP :40.71, -0.49, -1.2% ) occupied the other end of the scale, down 1.3%.
The Amex Natural Gas Index (XNG : 515.51, -1.52, -0.3% ) was down 0.6% at 514 points and the Philadelphia Oil Service Index ($OSX :274.34, +0.09, +0.0% ) was flat at 274 points, both recovering at least half the ground lost at the open.
Crude for August delivery was last trading on the New York Mercantile Exchange at $72.61 a barrel, up 42 cents in a sharp reversal of an overnight sell-off that took it as low as $41.60.
A spate of unscheduled refinery repairs in the Midwest was blamed for putting the pressure on crude prices. Unit outages at BP's (BP : 74.05, -0.03, 0.0% ) 410,000 barrel-per-day Whiting, Ind., refinery and Valero Energy Corp's (VLO : 78.10, +1.15, +1.5% ) Ardmore, Okla., refinery were among the problems cutting into crude oil demand in the region.
At the same time, the drop in refining capacity at the height of the driving season is keeping upward pressure on gasoline prices. The August reformulated gasoline contract for delivery at New York Harbor was last up nearly 2 cents Tuesday at $2.3615 a gallon, having touched another contract high earlier of $2.3658.
Marathon Oil Corp. (MRO : 64.16, +0.26, +0.4% ) was trading 0.7% lower at $63.46 a share. The company provided investors a second-quarter interim earnings update on Monday in which it noted that oil and gas sales will likely average the equivalent of 343,000 barrels of oil a day, within the range it earlier predicted.
UBS issued a research note Tuesday predicting that Marathon's second-quarter earnings will come in as high as $2.34 a share, far higher than the $1.92 consensus on Wall Street.
