Light, sweet crude for August delivery lost 32 cents to $72.49 a barrel in Asian electronic trading on the New York Mercantile Exchange mid-afternoon in Singapore.

On Tuesday, the contract rose 62 cents to settle at $72.81 a barrel, a new 10-month high.

August Brent crude fell 21 cents to $76.19 a barrel on the ICE Futures exchange in London.

In this week's U.S. petroleum supply snapshot by the U.S. Energy Department's Energy Information Administration, due later Wednesday, analysts surveyed by Dow Jones Newswires expect that crude oil inventories fell 600,000 barrels for the week through July 6.

Refinery utilization is expected to grow by half a percentage point to 90.5 percent during the week. That should boost gasoline inventories by about 640,000 barrels. Analysts projected that inventories of distillates, which include heating oil and diesel fuel, would rise 800,000 barrels.