Oil floats above $64
March 24, 2006LONDON (Reuters) - Oil held above $64 a barrel after hitting a near seven-week high on Friday as renewed supply woes in Nigeria 
increased expectations of prolonged outages in Africa’s largest producer.
Oil in New York surged 3.5 percent on Thursday after Italian energy firm Eni said it could not honor crude oil export commitments from its Nigerian Brass River terminal, after a pipeline attack last week.
"I’d be expecting Nigerian outages to last for another couple of months," said Deborah White of SG CIB Commodities in Paris. "It’s not particularly that the situation has deteriorated, but it is indeed quite serious."
U.S. light crude for May delivery was up 69 cents at $64.60 a barrel in mid-morning trade. It hit a peak of $64.75 earlier Friday, the highest since Feb. 7.
London Brent crude was up 45 cents at $63.72 after a surge of $1.76 the previous day.
Eni’s Brass River terminal loads around 200,000 barrels per day (bpd). The pipeline blast shut in 75,000 bpd of Eni’s Nigerian output, but the company said on Thursday that if all went well, it could be repaired within a week.
Exports from Nigeria, a member of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries and Africa’s largest producer, have been cut back by attacks on oil installations there.
Royal Dutch Shell and other companies already have shut down 630,000 bpd of production, 26 percent of the capacity in the world’s eighth-largest crude exporter.
via CNN.
