Posted on 04/22/2008 5:41:47 AM PDT by thackney
Oil prices rose Tuesday to a all-time highs above $118 a barrel on concerns over supplies from some key producers.
Light, sweet crude for May delivery rose as high as $118.05 a barrel in electronic trading on the New York Mercantile Exchange, eclipsing Monday's all-time high of $117.83.
By midday in Europe, the contract had risen to $117.77, up 29 cents on Monday's close of $117.48 a barrel. The May contract expires at the end of trading Tuesday.
In London, Brent crude futures added 28 cents to $114.71 a barrel on the ICE Futures exchange.
A Royal Dutch Shell PLC joint venture in Nigeria said Monday it may have to cut crude deliveries some 169,000 barrels a day in April and May because militants sabotaged a pipeline last week in the country's south.
The company, Shell Petroleum Development Co., declared force majeure on its April and May oil delivery contracts from its 400,000-barrel-a-day Bonny fields, effective April 22, a move that protects it from litigation if it fails to deliver on contractual obligations to buyers.
Militancy and lawlessness have spread in Nigeria's south, and attacks on oil infrastructure have become common.
"The disruption in Nigeria with Royal Dutch Shell is serious," said Victor Shum, an energy analyst with Purvin & Gertz in Singapore.
"It is light, sweet crude, which is much desired by the U.S. market during the summer gasoline season, so that certainly has affected the market," Shum said.
Nigeria is a major supplier to the United States. Attacks there in the past two years have cut nearly a quarter of the African country's oil output. Crude oil set a record above $117 Monday after the 150,000-ton tanker Takayama was attacked off the coast of Yemen as it headed for Saudi Arabia.
Kyodo News agency said there were no injuries, but the the rocket punctured a tank, spilling hundreds of gallons of fuel.
Analysts said comments Tuesday by the head of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries about plans to boost oil production target capacity by 5 million barrels a day by 2012 would not have an immediate effect on oil prices.
Speaking at an energy forum in Rome, OPEC Secretary-General Abdalla Salem el-Badri told reporters that issues of supply and demand were being discussed but he did not expect any agreement on whether prices are too high or too low.
"This is not anything new and it will not help ease oil prices," said Ehsan ul-Haq, head of research at JBC Energy in Vienna, Austria. "The oil futures market is very strong, but the physical markets are not so strong."
Other supply developments also factored into the market. In Mexico, oil production slipped 7.8 percent in the first quarter to 2.91 million barrels a day as output at the country's traditional oil fields wanes, state oil company Petroleos Mexicanos said. In Scotland, workers at Ineos PLC's 196,000 barrel-a-day Grangemouth refinery and petrochemical plant have threatened to strike for 48 hours from April 27 over changes to an employee pension plan.
The weak U.S. dollar has continued to support oil prices despite strengthening some this week against the yen and euro. Commodities such as oil and gold are still attractive hedges to investors seeking hedges against further drops in the currency.
In other Nymex trading, heating oil futures fell 0.04 cent to $3.3110 a gallon while gasoline futures lost 0.29 cent to $2.9762 a gallon. Natural gas futures were unchanged at $10.733 per 1,000 cubic feet.
Speculators strike again.
Alaska...North Dakota....Bueller?
I repeat an old tagline: ANWR would look good in pumps.
Wonderful.......... Our country could use a Ronald Reagan to get us out of this mess right now. Too bad we only have three Senators that are all Stooges. A new party needs to come up and fast. I can’t take the weak a$$ leadership our country has from two sell out parties.
$120 by Friday close......
Along with Anwar, we need to drill here off the Mississippi Gulf coast. Add Florida. Two Republican governors oppose drilling,Barbour and Crist along with a MS Democrat Congressman Taylor.
We have to drill everywhere we know and add more nuclear.
Don’t expect help from GOP morons Grassley, Bond or Lugar. They’re bought and paid for by ADM and the corn lobby.
Plenty in ANWR
$120.00 = Bet on it!
And THAT makes crude go up 3-4 bucks??? A lousy couple of hundred gallons of gas?
Yep, and if President Clinton had not vetoed ANWR, it would be flowing oil today.
Of course the excuse then was it would take 10 years to start production. That was about 12 years ago.
When it starts to go it's going to be a looooong slide down.
There are articles appearing here and there warning that oil is in a price bubble. Yet, there are those insisting that “this time it’s different.” I consider these first article to be leading edge indicators.
A couple of years ago the first warnings came out about the housing bubble. Those articles were ignored. Now, the area where I live, houses that were easily selling for $300,000 sit for months priced under $200,000.
Looks to me like Oil is about to do the same.
Well let's see, we've had the tech bubble, and when that ended people moved their money into real estate, causing a bubble there. Then that ended, and now the oil futures market is climbing out of site, unsupported by fundamentals. . .
It seems to me that people keep moving their money into the next thing every time a bubble bursts, so assuming you are right and the oil futures bubble is near its end, where is that money likely to go? Is it going to be lost, or moved into the next thing to create a new bubble, and if so, where? If you guess right, you could make a fortune.
Think of it as "Super-delegate" gas.
It’s easy for me to look at what has happened historically and say with fair confidence what is going to happen. (btw, I’d forgotten about the tech bubble, thanks for the reminder) However, I just don’t know anything about the commodities market and think I’d have a better chance making money in Las Vegas.
Auto sales in China are booming, with analysts and automakers forecasting growth at 15-20 percent this year. But demand for the biggest vehicles is even stronger, with sales of luxury cars and SUVs expected to surge by 40-45 percent.
Buyers of land yachts have also been unintended beneficiaries of a government policy meant to help the poor. Beijing has tried to shield farmers and the urban poor from high oil prices by freezing pump prices for gasoline and diesel, keeping them among the world's lowest. That takes the sting out of filling up a gas guzzler.
Hmm, so, how is China subsidizing the cost of gasoline?
They can’t buy high and sell low. At some point it will catch up to them.
It isn’t going to be pretty when the Chinese market crashes.
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