patient or foolhardy????, page-2

nymex oil falls as opec poised to keep pumping p/s i still hold

NYMEX oil falls as OPEC poised to keep pumping
AAP News
7:52:020 8/03/2006
NEW YORK, March 7 (Reuters) - U.S. crude oil futures fell
almost $1 on Tuesday as OPEC members signaled they would leave
cartel output unchanged at their meeting on Wednesday.
Gasoline futures continued to fall as players got out of
positions before a switch to the new RBOB contract.
Crude for April delivery settled down 83 cents at
$61.58 per barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange.
April gasoline dropped 2.26 cents to $1.6334 per
gallon, while April heating oil fell 3.55 cents to
$1.7222 per gallon.
In London, April Brent crude settled down $1.17 at
$61.17 per barrel.
"We took potential bullish news off the table as OPEC is
talking politely," said a NYMEX floor trader. "Gasoline is
tanking and may go even further. The funds are bailing out of
that because we're changing contracts pretty soon."
NYMEX will delist the reformulated gasoline contract at the
end of the year. The new RBOB contract is expected to become
the more liquid of the two as early as May.
The Dow Jones-AIG Commodity Index will drop the NYMEX
reformulated gasoline contract and replace it with RBOB
next month.
The July 2006 contract will be the first RB futures
contract included in the calculation of the index, while the
May contract will be the last HU futures contract included.
In Vienna, Libya, Kuwait, Nigeria, Saudi Arabia and Algeria
were among OPEC members who said that they expected the cartel
to keep output unchanged at its meeting tomorrow.
"There are simply too many geopolitical factors to change
production," said OPEC President Edmund Daukoru, also Nigeria's
oil minister.
Kuwaiti Oil Minister Sheikh Ahmad al-Fahd al-Sabah said
OPEC was working to bring U.S. oil below $60 and he believed
there was no need for the organization to cut output all year.
Daukoru also said that 75 percent of the Nigerian output
shut down by rebels will be back within about two weeks.
A Reuters survey of consultants, shippers and OPEC sources
put OPEC production at almost 30 million barrels per day in
February.
Oil supplies are well above average in the United States
and are expected to continue to rise.
In an updated Reuters poll, analysts on average predicted
that already brimming U.S. crude stocks rose again last week by
1.6 million barrels.
The analysts also forecast on average that gasoline
inventories fell by 600,000 barrels and distillate stocks fell
by 1.6 million barrels.
Refinery runs were seen up by 0.1 percentage point to 85.3
percent of capacity.
The Energy Information Administration, the statistical arm
of the Department of Energy, will release the official data on
Wednesday morning.




REUTERS
Reut 20:51 03-07-06