Commodities: Dakota Access line set for approval

West Texas Intermediate crude oil futures were slightly higher but off their best levels of the session following a bumper weekly US oil inventory report and as news broke that the Dakota Access line was set to receive the final 'green light' needed.

According to the Energy Information Administration, the US Department of Energy's statistical arm, commercial crude oil stockpiles in the US jumped by 6.5m barrels a day over the week ending on 27 January.

However, the EIA also revealed that domestic US oil production slipped by 46,000 b/d during the latest week to 8.915m b/d.

In parallel, Bloomberg reported that North Dakota, US Senator John Hoeven had said the Army Corps of Engineers was ready to provide the final authorisation needed for the last leg of the project to be completed.

That would give oil shale explorers at the Baaken shale formation in the Northern US a less costly route to markets in the Midwest and to the Gulf coast.

As of 1731 GMT Bloomberg's commodity index was up by 0.48% at 88.00 even as the US dollar spot index was higher by 0.38% to 99.889 ahead of the US central bank's policy announcement later that evening.

Copper futures on COMEX were lower by 0.66% to $2.7095 a pound despite news that 99.0% of staff at BHP Billiton's Escondida copper mine, in Chile, had voted in favour of a strike, possibly as soon as 6 February.

Meanwhile, the bounce in the dollar took some of the lustre from precious metals prices, with April 2017 gold futures on COMEX down 0.56% to $1,204.60/oz..

March 2017 corn futures were moving higher by 1.39% to $3.6475 a bushel on the CBoT.

To take note of, reports indicated fighting in eastern Ukraine between government forces and combined Russian-separatist fighters in the east of the country were again on the rise.