Oil prices top $61 in volatile session
NEW YORK (AP) - Oil prices rose Friday in a volatile session, driven by tensions with oil-producing Iran and expectations of continued pressure on U.S. petroleum product supplies
Light, sweet crude for April delivery added 29 cents to $61.24 in afternoon trading on the New York Mercantile Exchange.
Earlier in the session, prices had climbed as high as $61.80, setting a new peak for 2007. They also dipped as low as $60.50 during the afternoon, partly because of profit taking, said Ritterbusch & Associates' Jim Ritterbusch.
Brent crude for April rose 39 cents to $61.01 on London's ICE Futures Exchange.
Senior diplomats from the five permanent U.N. Security Council nations and Germany will meet on Monday in London to start work on a new resolution to try to pressure Iran to suspend its uranium enrichment program, which can lead to the production of nuclear weapons.
Iran President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and influential former President Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani said in separate speeches on Friday that critics of Iran's nuclear program are 'bullying' the country. A day earlier, the U.N. nuclear watchdog said that Iran -- OPEC's No. 2 supplier -- is still refusing to end uranium enrichment, in defiance of the Security Council.
'With the path of the events drifting toward a more confrontational outcome, we expect geopolitics -- and Iran in particular -- to remain an important supportive factor for oil prices going forward,' Barclays Capital analysts wrote in a research note.
Traders also continued to react to U.S. inventory figures released Thursday, analysts said. Key among them was gasoline inventories falling by 3.1 million barrels to 222.1 million barrels, and distillates, which include heating oil and diesel, dropping by 5 million barrels to 128.3 million barrels.
Analysts were expecting, on average, a modest rise in crude oil and gasoline inventories and a smaller drop in distillates.
Tim Evans, an energy analyst with Citigroup Futures Research, said relatively low utilization rates at refineries will likely mean further declines in product inventories next week. Refineries operated at 85.2 percent of capacity last week, as operations shut for maintenance and other work.
Natural gas futures fell 8.9 cents to $7.638 per 1,000 cubic feet on the Nymex and heating oil rose 2.46 cents to $1.7496 a gallon. Gasoline futures rose less than a penny to $1.755 per gallon.
Associated Press writers George Jahn in Vienna, Austria and Tanalee Smith in Singapore contributed to this report.
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