Oil up in Asia as Libya unrest stokes supply fears

SINGAPORE – Crude rose in Asian trade Wednesday as unrest in Libya and the region continued to stoke supply fears, analysts said.

New York’s main contract, light sweet crude for delivery in May, gained 26 cents to $105.23 per barrel while Brent North Sea crude for May was up 51 cents to $116.21.

“The issues of Libya and Yemen have been driving prices of crude oil up, although Yemen is a small exporter and Libya has been more significant,” said John Vautrain, vice president for Purvin and Gertz energy consultancy.

“The situation is probably going to last for a while,” Vautrain, based in Singapore, told AFP.

The conflict in Libya continued to press the markets, after forcing the shutdown of more than three-quarters of the country’s oil production.

Oil-rich Libya was producing 1.69 million barrels a day before the unrest, according to the International Energy Agency. It is now producing 400,000 barrels a day.

In Yemen, President Ali Abdullah Saleh’s offer to quit by January failed to appease escalating opposition to his 32-year rule, as Washington warned that Yemen’s crisis could serve to boost Al-Qaeda.

Meanwhile the spike in oil prices could shave half a percentage point off growth of the world’s advanced economies by 2012, according to a study by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development published Tuesday.

It said that if the $25 per barrel increase in prices since the start of the year is sustained, “activity could be reduced by about 0.5 percentage points in the OECD area by 2012 and inflation could rise by 0.75 percentage points”.