Oil ends steady under $74

Oil steadied below $74 on Wednesday as dealers paused to see if US crude and gasoline stocks fell last week and whether an international conference in Rome can help end violence in the Middle East.
US light sweet crude shed 8 cents to $73.67 a barrel by 0607 GMT, following the previous day's $1.30 or 1.7 percent drop, the first decline in four days. Brent crude was down 3 cents to $73.25 a barrel.
Oil hit a record-high of $78.40 a barrel almost two weeks ago as the unfolding violence between Israel and Hizbollah rattled traders who feared it could draw in major regional producers.
After 15 days, the conflict has yet to threaten flows from a region that pumps a third of the world's crude, easing some anxieties and helping prices retreat 6 percent from their peaks.
A conference convening later on Wednesday in Rome is also under mounting pressure to help end the war after an Israeli air strike killed four UN observers a day ago.
"Oil prices at current levels carry very little risk premium... from the Israel-Lebanon conflict. That's probably as it should be though," said Tobin Gorey, commodities analyst at Commonwealth Bank of Australia.
Hizbollah vowed on Wednesday not to accept any "humiliating" conditions for a truce with Israel in the war, which has killed 418 people in Lebanon and 42 Israelis since July 12 when it was triggered by Hizbollah capturing two Israeli soldiers.
Lebanon and its Arab allies will plead at the Rome conference for an immediate cease-fire in Israel's war against Hizbollah guerrillas, but the United States will insist a lasting solution needs to be agreed first.
Attention will shift this afternoon to US weekly oil inventory data, expected to show a 700,000-barrel draw on crude stocks and a 200,000-barrel decline in gasoline tanks, an expanded Reuters poll found. US Department of Energy data is due at 1430 GMT.
A spate of refinery outages at plants supplying fuel to the United States, where gasoline demand accounts for more than a tenth of the world's oil consumption, has raised concerns about supplies over the latter half of the peak driving season.
A distillation unit at Venezuela's Amuay refinery - part of the world's biggest refining complex and a top supplier of US gasoline imports - will be shut for two months of repairs following a fire, state oil firm PDVSA said, less than the five to seven month outage that traders had feared.