| BP halted output at the North Sea Valhall platform last night and ConocoPhillips will close five nearby platforms today, the companies said. |
| Prices had earlier extended yesterday's losses after the US Energy Department reported a smaller-than-expected decline in stockpiles last week. |
| "The market is being made more jittery by the storms in the North Sea," said Christopher Bellew, a broker at Bache Commodities Ltd. in London. "With oil near $100, sentiment is unusually edgy." |
| Crude oil for December delivery rose as much as $1.04, or 1.1 per cent, to $97.41 a barrel in electronic trading on the New York Mercantile Exchange. The contract traded at $97.04 a barrel at 11:46 am London time. |
| Brent crude oil for December settlement rose as much as $1.11, or 1.2 per cent, to $94.35 a barrel on London's ICE Futures exchange. The contract traded at $94.07 at 11:46 am. |
| Futures had fallen as much as 3.8 per cent from yesterday's record $98.62 a barrel after the Energy Department said US crude oil stockpiles fell half as much as analysts predicted. Distillate inventories, including heating oil and diesel, rose 98,000 barrels, when a 450,000-barrel decline was expected. |
| "Crude inventories declined by sufficiently less than consensus expectations to take some profits," said Harry Tchilinguirian, an analyst at BNP Paribas SA in London. |
| "This may be a case of taking a step back in order to take a larger leap forward: $100 is still in sight." |
| Oil supplies in the world's largest consumer fell 821,000 barrels in the week ended November 2. A 1.5 million-barrel decline was expected, based on a Bloomberg News survey of 16 analysts. |
| The benchmark crude oil price for the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries, whose members supply more than 40 per cent of the world's oil, rose above $90 a barrel for the first time. The price, a weighted average of one export crude oil from each of OPEC's 12 members, rose to $90.71 yesterday. |
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