Light sweet crude prices started cranking out hits this morning in a rally that’s taken the price back up to $61.75 and gas prices will make you squeal as they hit $1.86 in morning trades. Brent Crude is back up over $60 on the IPE in London this morning. Traders shook off the bombing because they’re much more scared of Dennis.
Dennis is quite nasty right now as 150 mile per hour winds give their best effort disrupt the world oil supply. It would seem they are succeeding. During the Cindy storm, Gulf production dropped considerably and took the overall U.S. production levels down by 3%. Dennis may actually do some real damage to the oil platforms. The storm is currently rated at a category 4 though meteorologists expect it to lose some of its ferocity.
Next would be the unexpected events in U.S. oil and refined products inventories. Crude dropped 3.6 million barrels compared to the Reuters survey suggesting a 1.6 million barrel decline. The big surprise cam in distillate inventories. Distillates, which includes heating oil, diesel and jet fuel, was expected to climb about 1.5 million barrels and went up a barrel busting 4.1 million to 117.2 million barrels. This might takes some pressure off traders as refineries hit 98.1% of capacity.
OPEC posted on their website the ORB went up slightly.
The price of OPEC basket of eleven crudes stood at 54.82 dollars a barrel on Thursday, compared with 54.80 dollars the previous day, according to OPEC Secretariat calculations.
The new OPEC Reference Basket of Crudes (ORB) is made up of the following: Saharan Blend (Algeria), Minas (Indonesia), Iran Heavy (Islamic Republic of Iran), Basra Light (Iraq), Kuwait Export (Kuwait), Es Sider (Libya), Bonny Light (Nigeria), Qatar Marine (Qatar), Arab Light (Saudi Arabia), Murban (UAE) and BCF 17 (Venezuela). 
Last year’s hurricane onslaught did serious damage to a number of platforms in the gulf and since Dennis is already a 4, it could do even more damage than last year’s Ivan which hit 3.
John Stith is a staff writer for Murdok covering technology and business.
