Oil Prices Rise As Gas, Heating Oil Gain

By GEORGE JAHN

VIENNA, Austria – Crude oil prices rose Tuesday as gasoline and heating oil gained amid predictions that inventories for those products would fall in the weekly government data due out on Wednesday.

Light, sweet crude for April delivery gained 33 cents by afternoon in Europe to $61.90 a barrel in electronic trading on the New York Mercantile Exchange. April Brent crude futures on the ICE Futures exchange rose 49 cents to $62.69 a barrel.

Gasoline futures rose more than 3 cents to $1.7770 a gallon (3.8 liters), while heating oil gained more than 2 cents to $1.7588 a gallon.

Vienna’s PVM Oil Associates forecast that gasoline and distillate stocks would decline in the weekly inventory data produced by the U.S. Department of Energy’s statistical arm, the Energy Information Administration.

PVM said gasoline stocks would fall by 1.3 million barrels due to declining imports, distillate stocks would decline by 1.6 barrels and crude would rise by 2.3 million barrels in the report to be released Wednesday.

Nymex oil prices had surged $1.81 on Monday to settle at $61.77 on nagging concerns about unrest in Nigeria and the possibility of U.N. sanctions against Iran, the No. 2 producer within OPEC, for its nuclear ambitions.

In Nigeria, recent attacks by militants on pipelines and oil facilities have left the country’s production down by about 400,000 barrels a day.

“We would expect the potential for further chaos in Nigeria to provide a floor for prices around $60 a barrel, and we expect Nigeria will continue to be a major issue in terms of supply security up to, and probably beyond, next year’s elections,” wrote Barclays Capital’s analysts in a research note.