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Oil reaches $106.34 on NYMEX

09 September 2008 10:07 (UTC +04:00)

Baku. Vugar Mustafayev - APA-Economics. Crude oil prices finished modestly higher Monday, but only after seesawing wildly as nervous traders watched the Hurricane Ike approach the Gulfâ€™s oil facilities.
The dollar also complicated energy trading as it rebounded against other major currencies, encouraging investors who bought commodities to hedge against a weaker U.S. currency to sell them.
Meanwhile, the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countriesâ€™ upcoming meeting in Vienna, Austria, continued to weigh on tradersâ€™ minds. OPEC oil ministers will be deciding whether to trim production in a bid to stall oilâ€™s recent slide. Iranian oil minister Gholam Hossein Nozari said he thinks there is too much crude on the market, but some analysts say they believe Saudi Arabia will try to thwart calls to cut production.
Minister of Energy Mohammed Bin Dhaen al-Hamli, who will lead the United Arab Emirates delegation, said that inventory levels indicate that "the market is well supplied," and that "the recent decline in prices simply shows that the oil price had risen too high and too fast."
Light, sweet crude for October delivery rose 11 cents to settle at $106.34 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange, after rising as high as $109.89 a barrel and falling as low as $104.70.
On Londonâ€™s ICE Futures exchange, October Brent crude finished lower, dropping 65 cents to settle at $103.44 a barrel.
Crude has plunged more than $40, or 27 percent, since surging to a record $147.27 a barrel on July 11. The drop has helped lower the retail price of gasoline for U.S. drivers. The average cost of a gallon of gasoline was $3.658 on Monday, down from $3.665 a day earlier and down from the record $4.114 on July 17.
In other Nymex trading Monday, gasoline futures rose 6.42 cents to settle at $2.7503 a gallon; heating oil futures rose 3.03 cents to settle at $3.0131 a gallon; and natural gas gained 7.8 cents to settle at $7.527 per 1,000 cubic feet.