Oil trades above $70 a barrel

Prices shot back up above the psychologically important $70 a barrel mark on Friday, trading at a level last seen 10 months ago for the second time in two days on worries about gasoline supplies.
With most U.S. refineries expected to increase output in the coming months after finishing maintenance, pressure on gasoline was expected to drop. Still, prices could remain high because increased refinery capacity puts greater demands on crude availability.
Light, sweet crude for August delivery on the New York Mercantile Exchange rose 61 cents to $70.18 a barrel in electronic trading by midday in Europe.
The Nymex crude contract had settled 60 cents higher at $69.57 a barrel on Thursday in the U.S. after rising as high as $70.52 and trading above $70 for several hours — the first time it did so in the past 10 months.
The U.S. Energy Department’s Energy Information Administration said Wednesday that gasoline inventories dropped 700,000 barrels in the week ended June 22. Analysts polled by Dow Jones Newswires had expected a 1.1 million barrel gain.
The EIA report also showed that crude oil supplies rose 1.6 million barrels to 350.9 million barrels last week, above the average estimate of a 1 million barrel increase. Refinery utilization rebounded 1.8 percentage points to 89.4 percent, higher than estimates of a gain of 0.8 percentage points.
Heating oil futures rose by more than 2 pennies to $2.0391 a gallon.