Oil Price Rises Above $103

Oil prices rose above 103 dollars a barrel Thursday in Asia, extending a 37 per cent rally during the last six weeks.

Benchmark crude for December delivery was up by 67 cents at 103.26 dollars a barrel at late afternoon Singapore time in electronic trading on the New York Mercantile Exchange.

The contract rose 3.22 dollars to settle at 102.59 dollars in New York on Wednesday.

Brent crude for January delivery slumped 28 cents to 111.60 dollars a barrel on the ICE Futures Exchange in London.

Oil has soared from 75 dollars on October 4 amid signs the U.S. economy is growing slowly – rather than slipping into a recession as some analysts feared during the summer.

Oil prices jumped Wednesday after Canadian pipeline company Enbridge announced it would ship crude away from a key delivery point in Cushing, Oklahoma.

The company bought a 50 per cent stake in the Seaway pipeline from ConocoPhillips and plans to use it to transport oil from Cushing to refineries along the Gulf Coast, where much of it will be shipped overseas because of rising demand from Latin America.

The benchmark U.S. crude is West Texas Intermediate or WTI.

“The belief that rising domestic production is flooding Cushing dictated the fate of WTI for most of the year,” Barclays Capital said in a report.

“This is where the reversal of Seaway has a huge totemic significance, in its ability to debottleneck Cushing.”