World oil prices rose today on worries that the ongoing storm season in the US Gulf would continue to hamper energy production and imports and so delay vital pre-winter stock building.
London Brent crude futures were up 27 cents to $41.02 a barrel, building on gains of 40 cents in the previous session. US light crude gained 17 cents to $44.05 a barrel.
Other than a couple of oil drilling rigs torn from their moorings, Hurricane Ivan's assult on the US Gulf coast appears to have caused no other damage to oil facilities.
But as Ivan abates, Tropical Storm Jeanne is following and is also likely to disrupt some production and imports.
Oil companies in the Gulf of Mexico are estimated to have shut in about four million barrels per day of production this week until Thursday as a precautionary measure against Ivan.
Over 11 billion cubic feet a day of gas production and 13 per cent of total US refining capacity has also been shut this week, while the closure of Gulf ports has prevented millions of barrels of oil imports from entering the country.
"We expect this outage to affect oil and natural gas inventory builds over the next few weeks," Merill Lynch said.
"The loss of production over this period, coupled with the disruption to imports offloading in the Gulf of Mexico being the key factors," it wrote in a report.
A string of storms in the last month has reduced US crude inventories in the past month and the Energy Department said on Wednesday crude stocks had fallen for the seventh week in a row last week, at a time when inventories should start to build.
The temporary halt in refinery operations is also likely to have curtailed vital production of winter heating fuels, stocks of which are below their five-year average.