BUMI bisa naik lagi ga ya..:)....
Oil Rises Above $78 to New One-Year High
Tuesday July 31, 12:45 pm ET
By John Wilen, AP Business Writer
Oil Prices Rise Above $78 to New 1-Year High on Inventory Expectations. Gas
Prices Fall. NEW YORK (AP) -- Oil prices set another one-year record Tuesday on
expectations that crude inventories fell last week and reports of new violence
in Nigeria, a large oil producer and key supplier to the U.S.Investors believe
Wednesday's inventory report by the Energy Department's Energy Information
Administration will show that refiners drew down oil inventories as they
continued to increase gasoline production last week, analysts said.News that a
Nigerian construction worker was kidnapped Tuesday added to the bullish tone of
a market that seems determined to test last year's record highs, analysts said.
"They want to get back to $78.40," the intraday price record set July 14, 2006,
said Jack Hunter, an energy trader at FC Stone Group in Kansas City.
Light, sweet crude for September delivery gained $1.31 to $78.14 a barrel on
the New York Mercantile Exchange. That put futures within striking distance of
the intraday record, and of the settlement price of $77.03 set the same day.
Oil's advance helped pull other energy futures higher. But news that Total
PetroChemicals USA Inc. is reducing output at a Texas refinery to perform
maintenance gave investors a rare additional reason to buy gasoline futures.
The August gasoline contract, which expires after the close of trading Tuesday,
rose 6.34 cents to $2.149 on the Nymex. Expiring futures contracts are often
subject to volatile swings as investors square positions.
At the pump, meanwhile, the average national price of a gallon of gas fell 1.4
cents overnight to $2.876, according to AAA and the Oil Price Information
Service. Retail prices, which typically lag the futures market, peaked at
$3.227 a gallon in late May. Futures at that point were rallying on concerns
that refiners were not making enough gas to meet summer driving demand.
"The gasoline market now appears amply supplied with the end of the heavy
driving season only about a month away," wrote Jim Ritterbusch, president of
Ritterbusch & Associates in Galena, Ill., in a research note.
That's part of the reason gasoline futures have fallen nearly 29 cents over the
last two weeks.
In other Nymex trading, heating oil futures rose 3.19 cents to $2.097 a gallon
and natural gas futures fell 15 cents to $6.349 per 1,000 cubic feet.
September Brent crude gained $1.05 to $76.79 a barrel on the ICE futures
exchange in London.
Analysts surveyed by Dow Jones Newswires, on average, expect Wednesday's
inventory report to show crude oil inventories fell by 690,000 barrels in the
week ended July 27 as refinery utilization rates rose by 0.7 percentage points
to 92.4 percent of operating capacity.
Gasoline stocks are expected to have increased by 1.1 million barrels, and
distillate stocks, which include heating oil and diesel fuel, to have risen 1.4
million barrels.
Declines in crude inventories have driven oil prices higher in recent weeks,
much to analysts' chagrin.
Vienna's PVM Oil Associates noted that "even with such a decline, U.S. crude
stocks would remain some 43 million barrels above the five-year average and
around 17 million barrels higher than seen in the same week last year."
Those fundamentals don't seem to matter to many speculators. Analysts say large
investment funds -- many of which trade on technical factors -- have pulled
money out of gasoline futures and plowed it into oil futures in recent weeks,
another factor driving high oil prices and undermining gasoline futures.
Investors are also closely watching OPEC, whose officials have been giving
mixed signals about whether the cartel will decide during a September meeting
to boost production.
"There is no official price band, but I think I can safely say we would not
feel comfortable if the oil price sank to $50 a barrel," said Abdalla Salem
el-Badri, secretary general of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting
Countries, in an interview with Austrian financial daily Wirtschaftsblatt
published Monday. "A price above $80 also wouldn't make us particularly
pleased."
Associated Press writers George Jahn in Vienna and Gillian Wong in Singapore
contributed to this report.
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