Oil Prices Rise After Government Report
WASHINGTON – Crude-oil prices rose Wednesday morning after the U.S. government’s weekly petroleum report showed a decline in domestic inventories of distillate fuel, which include heating oil and diesel.
But the report also showed a surprising build in crude-oil supplies and that could offset any gains.
Crude prices were also buoyed slightly by news that unknown assailants had blown up a Royal Dutch Shell pipeline in Nigeria on Tuesday, killing at least eight people and knocking 170,000 barrels of crude offline.
February light sweet crude rose 41 cents to $58.50 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange. February Brent crude futures on London’s ICE Futures exchange rose 25 cents to $56.42 a barrel.
The Energy Information Administration, a division of the Energy Department, said U.S. inventories of distillate fuel fell by 2.8 million barrels to 127.7 million barrels, or 2 percent above year-ago levels.
Gasoline inventories declined by 300,000 barrels to 204.1 million barrels, or 5 percent below year-ago levels.
The supply of crude oil rose last week by 1.3 million barrels to 322.5 million barrels, or 12 percent above year ago levels. Analysts surveyed by Dow Jones Newswires had expected a decline of 1.1 million barrels in crude-oil inventories and a similar decline in distillates due to last week’s heavy snowstorms in the eastern United States.
Heating oil rose half a cent to $1.7258 a gallon, gasoline gained almost a cent to $1.5110 a gallon, while natural gas lost 21 cents to $13.870 per 1,000 cubic feet.
In Nigeria on Tuesday, attackers set off dynamite at a Royal Dutch Shell PLC pipeline in the south of Africa’s largest exporter, which helped lift prices.
Shell spokesman Andy Corrigan confirmed the blast, but had no information on what set it off or whether it caused injuries.
Unrest in key producers Nigeria, Saudi Arabia and Iraq was partly blamed for the price rise in 2004 when analysts had said any disruption to supply could affect the world’s already thin buffer of spare crude.