by Perrine Faye
LONDON, Aug 4 (AFP) - Oil prices climbed to new record high levels on Wednesday, driven by unbridled global consumption and a warning from OPEC producers that they cannot pump any more oil, traders said.
New York's reference contract, light sweet crude for delivery in September, rose 15 cents to a new historic peak of 44.30 dollars per barrel in electronic deals.
London's Brent North Sea crude oil for September delivery climbed 35 cents to a record 40.99 dollars a barrel, breaking through a previous best of 40.95 dollars seen in October 1990 after the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait.
"Spare capacity is at an historic all-time low level, which helps to keep the prices very strong," GNI-Man Financial trader Lee Elliott said.
The president of the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries, Purnomo Yusgiantoro of Indonesia, warned Tuesday that the cartel could not pump any faster in the short run to keep up with surging demand.
He described current prices as "crazy".
Analysts said sky-high prices were the result of a mix of fear and fundamentals, with worries over terrorism and the risks of supply disruptions from Russia, Iraq and Venezuela accompanied by burgeoning demand.
"There is clearly a very strong demand, mainly from China and the US, fuelled by very, very strong growth in those two countries," said one oil industry analyst at a European bank.
"From the supply point of view, OPEC is producing at their maximum capacity at the moment, so they can't open the tap up to lower prices," he added.
OPEC, which produces a third of the world's oil, agreed in June to raise its output ceiling by two million barrels per day in July and by a further 500,000 barrels from August 1 to help to cool prices.
The price of the OPEC basket of seven crude oils reached a new record high of 39.33 dollars on Tuesday, an OPEC spokesman said from the cartel's Vienna headquarters.
Fears about tight supplies have grown in recent weeks amid an increased threat of disruption to Russian exports because of the financial crisis at energy giant Yukos.
Yukos faces a 3.4-billion-dollar tax bill for 2000 that it cannot pay because its assets have been frozen and company bosses have repeatedly warned that the Russian oil giant could be forced to declare bankruptcy within days.
Prices have been further fuelled by sabotage attacks to pipelines in major producer Iraq.
The latest such incident Tuesday on the main pipeline connecting the oil fields of Kirkuk with the Turkish port of Ceyhan halted limited exports from northern Iraq, a Northern Oil Company official said.
Traders were also keeping a nervous watch on Venezuela ahead of an August 15 referendum there which the opposition hopes will unseat controversial President Hugo Chavez.
"There is the referendum in Venezuela in the middle of August. So there is a risk there as well of a new political explosion, which could have an effect on the national oil company PDVSA," said the oil analyst.
"We saw what happened in 2002 when production went almost to zero," he added, referring to a strike which crippled Venezuela's oil exports.
Meanwhile, markets were looking ahead to publication later Wednesday of the latest weekly estimates of US oil inventories, with analysts predicting modest falls in stocks of crude oil and gasoline but a rise in those of distillates.