Crude oil edges lower, as North Dakota’s shut supplies slowly return (NYSEARCA:USO)

Crude oil futures settled slightly lower in choppy trading Tuesday, a day after settling at their highest levels of the new year, with no new developments in the Red Sea and the opening of Libya’s largest oil field.

Libya’s National Oil Corp. said it lifted force majeure on its 300K bbl/day Sharara oilfield that was shut down for several weeks due to protests.

In North Dakota, the third-largest oil-producing U.S. state, some output came back online after shutting because of extreme cold, with outages last week running as high as 700K bbl/day, but production was still down as much as 300K bbl/day as of Tuesday.

Several weeks or even months could pass before production operations are fully restored due to potential damage that has not yet been fully assessed, Sevens Report Research co-editor Tyler Richey said.

The fact that more than 90% of North Dakota’s oil and gas is derived from fracking and horizontal drilling practices “only adds to the complications for bringing operations back online,” Richey said, according to MarketWatch.

Analysts say persistent weakness in U.S. gasoline demand also has hurt oil prices; while U.S. crude inventories fell by 6.67M barrels last week, gasoline inventories jumped by 7.2M barrels, according to American Petroleum Institute figures.

Front-month Nymex crude (CL1:COM) for March delivery ended -0.5% to $74.37/bbl, and front-month March Brent crude (CO1:COM) closed -0.6% to $79.55/bbl.

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Mergers and acquisitions among U.S. oil and gas producers reached a record of $144B during Q4, lifting total deal value for the full year to more than $190B, also a record, data analytics firm Enverus reported Tuesday.

Exxon Mobil’s (XOM) $65B deal for Pioneer was the third largest oil and gas acquisition ever by enterprise value, while Chevron’s (CVX) purchase of Hess for $60B was the fourth largest, the company said.

With the main shale plays already defined, “M&A has become the preferred tool to replace declining reserves,” Enervus Senior VP Andrew Dittmar said.