By Barani Krishnan 

Investing.com – U.S. West Texas Intermediate crude futures struggled to keep a floor beneath a three-day rebound as traders and investors looked for fresh signs that production cuts, well shut-ins and rig losses were biting in a bigger way on the country’s highly-efficient oil fracking system.

Brent, the global crude benchmark, meanwhile, slid on Bloomberg data showing that OPEC’s crude production surged by the most in almost 30 years last month as its biggest members fought to dominate a global market devastated by the coronavirus crisis.

“This was a month that will go in the history books, one that you will be able to tell your grandchildren (if they still care about oil by then),” Olivier Jakob of the Zug, Switzerland-based oil risk consultancy PetroMatrix said in his daily note, reviewing April’s activity as well as the start of May trading. 

“The month started with a focus on demand destruction and ended with the focus shifting to supply destruction,” Jakob said, referring to the 8% decline in WTI in April, after the first ever negative pricing for the U.S. benchmark, and its rebound since to a 13% gain for this week.

was up 71 cents, or 3.8%, at $19.55 per barrel by 1:30 PM ET (17:30 GMT) after hitting a two-week high of $20.45 earlier. 

fell 28 cents, or 1%, to $26.20.

Brent fell after a Bloomberg survey showed that OPEC’s most powerful member, Saudi Arabia, pumped a record of more than 11 million barrels a day as it waged a price war against its former ally Russia.

Though they reached a truce by mid-April, striking a deal to cut vast amounts of supply, the Saudis continued to keep production high for much of the month — even with demand suffering an unprecedented freefall, Bloomberg reported.

WTI has jumped $7, or nearly 57%, since Tuesday’s settlement, helped by a mix of happy news on progress achieved over a potential drug for acute Covid-19 patients. a lower-than-expected weekly build in , unexpected weekly drawdown in gasoline stockpiles and optimism over the reopening of U.S. businesses from Covid-19 lockdowns.

Just a week ago, U.S. crude prices were struggling to stay in double-digit territory amid fears that the United States will run out of space soon to store oil from all the piled-up supply since the country went into lockdown to curb the spread of the virus. Slower crude builds since last week eased some of the storage fears, helping WTI rebound.

Still there was no sign of the magic number sought by oil bulls indicating that production was collapsing. 

The Energy Information Administration estimated that at the end of last week, U.S. crude production stood at 12.1 million barrels per day, down by just 1 million bpd from a record high of 13.1 million bpd in mid-March. That’s a remarkably slow slide compared to the stories in the media of voluntary production shut-ins, rig cuts and reductions in capital expenditure announced by various oil drillers.

Industry firm Baker Hughes said on Friday that {ecl-1652||oil rigs}} it surveyed across the United States fell by 53 this week, bringing to 358, or 53%, the total number of oil rigs lost over the last seven weeks. 

Despite their cutbacks in production now, U.S. oil drillers have also become victims of their own success in recent years, by achieving admirable drilling efficiency from fracking in their shale fields.

“The U.S. upstream sector is currently deploying 438 or 72.8% fewer drilling rigs than in October of 2014, but is producing 3,425,000 bpd (38.6%) more oil ,” Dominick Chirichella, director of risk and trading at the Energy Management Institute in New York, noted in recent research.