By Barani Krishnan
NEW YORK (Reuters) - Oil prices rose as much as 1 percent on Wednesday in anticipation the U.S. government would report a weekly drop in crude and gasoline stockpiles, tempering glut worries heightened by Saudi Arabia's record high oil output.
Analysts expect the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) to cite a drawdown of about 1 million barrels each in both domestic crude and gasoline inventories for the week ended Aug 5 in data due at 10:30 a.m. EDT (1430 GMT).
The American Petroleum Institute (API), a trade group, issued its own inventory data on Tuesday that showed a build of 2.1 million barrels instead in crude. But it also reported a drop of 3.9 million barrels in gasoline, much larger than analysts had forecast.
The API's numbers are based on voluntary reporting by its members and represent a smaller sampling than the EIA data.
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U.S. West Texas Intermediate (WTI) crude futures were up 25 cents, or 0.6 percent, at $43.02 per barrel by 9:54 a.m. EDT (1354 GMT). It fell as much 69 cents earlier in the session on concerns about Saudi crude production in July.
Brent crude futures rose 36 cents, or nearly 1 percent, to $45.34.
"We view the energy complex as morphing into a consolidation phase," Jim Ritterbusch of Chicago-based oil markets consultancy Ritterbusch & Associates said.
"The downward pull from the gasoline market that facilitated much of the July price decline appears to have been stalled by a combined gasoline stock draw of about 7.5 million barrels during the past couple of weeks."
WTI had its sharpest monthly fall in a year in July, dropping 14 percent, after runaway gasoline demand for the summer still fell short of refiner production. On Tuesday, the EIA scaled back estimates for U.S. crude oil output declines for 2016.
Top crude exporter Saudi Arabia boosted its oil output to a record high of 10.67 million barrels-per-day (bpd) in July, the kingdom told the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries.
News of the galloping Saudi output comes as OPEC member Venezuela tries to drum up support for a global meeting of oil producers to decide measures that would buoy oil prices. The last such effort for a production freeze failed in April.
"The mere suggestion of OPEC working in the background on a price support initiative should be enough to hold the market in the $43-$45 levels in the near term," said Salvatore Recco, who helps oversee about $2 billion of client money, including some in oil, at Gravity Investments in Denver, Colorado.
(Additional reporting by Ahmad Ghaddar in LONDON and Henning Gloystein in SINGAPORE; Editing by William Hardy and Jeffrey Hodgson)
