Crude oil futures are falling more than 2% to close out the trading week, driven by another increase in the number of crude oil rigs in the US. Oil prices have popped on the news of a coronavirus vaccine, but they have since ended the momentum and trading in the $40 range. Will the resurgence of COVID-19 cases continue to hurt crude prices toward the end of 2020?

December West Texas Intermediate (WTI) crude oil futures tumbled $0.90, or 2.19%, to $40.22 per barrel at 18:57 GMT on Friday on the New York Mercantile Exchange. US crude will post a weekly surge of more than 7%, paring its year-to-date decline to roughly 34%.

Brent, the international benchmark for oil prices, is traveling relatively sideways to end another week of trading. January Brent crude futures dipped $0.02, or 0.05%, to $42.76 a barrel on London’s ICE Futures exchange.

According to Baker Hughes, the oil rig count in the United States came in at 236 in the week ending November 13. This is up from 226 in the previous week. This also represents the fifth conseutive week that the oil rig count was above 200. The Baker Hughes total rig count reached 312, which is the second straight week that the figure was at 300 or more.

On Thursday, the Energy Information Administration (EIA) reported that domestic crude inventories rose by 4.3 million barrels for the week ending November 6. The market had penciled in a drop of three million barrels. Oil stockpiles at the Cushing, Oklahoma storage facility slipped 500,000 barrels for the week.

Gasoline inventories slid by 2.3 million barrels, while distillate supplies fell by 5.4 million barrels.

The weekly EIA report was postponed to Thursday because of the Veterans Day holiday in the United States on Wednesday.

In a separate Short-Term Energy Outlook (STEO) report, the EIA reduced its 2020 and 2021 projections. According to the report, WTI crude prices are projected to slump 1.3% to $38.24 in 2020. The US government anticipates that oil prices will average $44.24 in 2021, down 1.1% from the previous estimate. It also forecasts that domestic oil production will average 11.39 million barrels per day (bpd) this year, down 0.5% from the last outlook, and 11.1 million bpd in 2021, up 0.1% from the previous report.

In other energy commodities, January natural gas futures edged up $0.005, or 0.16%, to $3.099 per million British thermal units (btu). December gasoline futures slid $0.0301, or 2.61%, to $1.1269 a gallon. December heating oil futures declined $0.0276, or 2.24%, to $1.2057 per gallon.