Posted on 02/20/2007 7:31:12 AM PST by delacoert
LONDON — Oil prices fell Tuesday after Iran's President said his country would halt its uranium enrichment program and return to negotiations, but only if Western nations do the same.
The contract for March delivery of light, sweet crude, which was to expire later Tuesday, fell 36 cents to $58.17 a barrel in electronic trading on the New York Mercantile Exchange by midday in Europe.
On London's ICE futures exchange, April Brent crude oil futures fell 28 cents to $57.86 a barrel.
Heating oil futures fell nearly 2 cents to $1.6349 a gallon while natural gas prices dropped 4.9 cents to $7.471 per 1,000 cubic feet.
One day ahead of a U.N. Security Council deadline, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said it was no problem for Iran to halt enrichment, but that "fair talks" demanded a similar gesture from the West.
The Security Council agreed on Dec. 23 to impose limited sanctions against Iran and gave the country 60 days to halt enrichment or face additional measures.
Despite Ahmadinejad's more conciliatory tone, the conditions were likely to keep a floor under price declines.
Traders were also watching for new developments after a weekend fire that caused the shutdown of a U.S. refinery, and the kidnapping of three Eastern European oil workers in Nigeria.
Valero Energy Corp. was uncertain when production would resume at its 158,000-barrel-a-day McKee refinery in Sunray, Texas, spokeswoman Mary Rose Brown said Monday.
"It's significant in that it's another refinery among many in the past two weeks that have had fires or glitches," said Tom Bentz, an analyst and broker at BNP Paribas in New York. "The impact it has will depend on how long the refinery is down."
Nigerian police said Monday that gunmen had seized two Croatians and a Montenegrin late Sunday. The three worked on oil platforms through a Croatian maritime company in the southern oil region's main city of Port Harcourt.
??? What, stop our uranium enrichment program?
Asking for the impossible is not conciliatory.
Oil prices fall below $58 a barrel:
http://biz.yahoo.com/ap/070220/oil_prices.html?.v=7
The fickle markets.
I totally agree. I suppose I should have put a sarcasm tag in my parenthetical addition to the title.
It baffles me how oil prices drop (presumably because of futures investor's response to this news) when Ahmadinejad's words have not been the least bit conciliatory. In fact, Ahmadinejad's words are smugly provocative.
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