Oil prices rose Wednesday in Asian trading ahead of the release of U.S. fuel inventory data expected to show a drop in domestic gasoline stocks.
Light, sweet crude for June delivery added 26 cents to $64.66 a barrel in electronic trading on the New York Mercantile Exchange mid-afternoon in Singapore. The contract fell $1.31 to $64.40 a barrel Tuesday.
Brent crude for June was up 35 cents at $67.35 a barrel on the ICE Futures exchange in London.
Stockpiles of gasoline for the week ended April 27 were estimated to have declined by 1.2 million barrels in the U.S. Department of Energy petroleum supply snapshot to be released later Wednesday, according to a Dow Jones Newswires survey of 10 energy analysts.
"The market is focused on whether there's going to be enough gasoline for the Northern summer driving season. It's a genuine question," said Tobin Gorey, a commodity strategist with Commonwealth Bank of Australia in Sydney.
U.S. gasoline stocks typically grow in the months of April and May but have been depressed this year by strong demand, low imports and refinery outages.
"The question now is whether there will be time for refiners to catch up to be ahead of demand rather than spend the entire summer trying to catch up," Gorey said.
But analysts also predicted the U.S. Energy Information Administration report to show refinery utilization increased by 0.8 of a percentage point. After a string of recent refinery outages, several refineries were restarting shuttered units, including Gary-Williams Energy Corp.'s 55,000 barrel-a-day Wynnewood, Okla., refinery and Valero Energy Corp.'s Texas City, Texas, plant.
Gasoline futures rose a tad to $2.2457 a gallon.
The report is also expected to show crude stocks were forecast to rise by 1.15 million barrels, while distillate stocks, which include heating oil and diesel fuel, were likely to grow by 210,000 barrels on average.
Crude futures were also supported by news Tuesday that six foreign oil workers were kidnapped and a Nigerian sailor was killed when dynamite-wielding militants attacked an oil vessel in Nigeria's oil-rich south.
A Nigerian spokesman for San Francisco-based Chevron said the company had shut down an oil station that supplies the ship because of the attack, decreasing production by 15,000 barrels a day.
Stepped-up violence since early 2006 in the unruly southern region where crude is pumped has cut Nigeria's daily production by about one quarter, helping send global crude prices higher. Nigeria, Africa's largest oil producer and a main crude supplier to the United States, is both one of Africa's richest countries and one of its most problem-laden, with vast oil reserves but also rampant corruption and violent crime.
Heating oil futures dropped 0.61 cent to $1.889 a gallon while natural gas prices added 0.5 cent to $7.723 per 1,000 cubic feet.
Source: AP News
