It was just a little over a year ago when Saudi Arabia declared open warfare on the U.S. energy producer, dumping cheap oil on U.S. shores to try to drive the U.S. oil producers out of business. Now the Saudi oil minister. Khalid al-Falih. wants to invest in U.S. oil because he believes that President Donald Trump is good for oil.

Khalid al-Falih said in an interview with the BBC that “President Trump has policies which are good for the oil industry and I think we have to acknowledge it”.In fact, the Saudi oil minister said he had no problem with Trump’s plan for the U.S. to become energy independent as long as the U.S. grows in line with energy demand.

Obviously, that is a change in Saudi Oil policy and the days when the old regime took offense when then President George W Bush said he wanted to break our addiction to oil. After that, the Saudi’s threw a fit and said they might cancel their investments in expanding production if the U.S. dared to try to put them out of business. Now along with big oil and Donald Trump, the U.S. shale fields are a hot place that the Saudis want to be a part of. 

Oil prices today are shaking off another crazy API report that showed U.S. oil inventories increased by over 5 million barrel (bbl) the biggest increase since October. Yet they also report about 906,000 barrels drop in Oklahoma Cushing. We also saw an increase in Gasoline +2.86m bbl and Distillates +2.27m bbl.

Oil may get some influence from the Fed today, While the Fed is expected to stand pat any indication about a direction in interest rates can move the dollar and oil.

Bloomberg is reporting that Output at Forties crude-feeding field remains reduced after an unspecified issue at site last week, per 2 people with knowledge of the partial outage. Unclear when field will return to full production, Field was restricted by ~30k b/d last week. Operator Nexin declined to comment at that time. NOTE: Field produced ~160k b/d from Oct. 2015-Sept. 2016.