NEW YORK, Sept 27 (AFP) - Oil futures jumped to their highest closing on record Monday on the New York Mercantile Exchange, rising 76 cents to 49.64 dollars a barrel as unrest in Nigeria and Saudi Arabia alarmed traders.
Oil prices soared after oil majors in Nigeria evacuated non-essential workers from the troubled Niger Delta oil region and as police clashed with suspected Islamic militants in Saudi Arabia's capital Riyadh at the weekend.
Crude moved as high as 49.75 dollars a barrel, topping the record intraday level of 49.40 of August 20, and ended above 49 dollars in the 21-year history of oil futures trading on the exchange.
"The problems of Nigeria have obviously got worse over the weekend, with both Shell and Agip (a unit of ENI) evacuating non-essential workers from the south Nigerian Delta," said Robert Laughlin, a trader at GNI-Man Financial.
"This is a major problem that we don't need because they produce sweet crude oil. There is just not enough sweet crude oil."
Adjusted for inflation, world oil prices remain far below the levels reached in the wake of the 1979 Iranian revolution when prices surged to about 80 dollars a barrel in today's money.
But prices have more than doubled from about 20 dollars a barrel in New York at the start of 2002, surging by about 50 percent since the start of this year.
Katherine Spector and Soozhana Choi at JPMorgan Energy Research said that they did not believe oil would breach the psychological barrier of 50 dollars "on this run."
But they noted, "the past several weeks have seen hurricane disruptions, ongoing Iraqi violence, and now signs of renewed unrest in Nigeria. As good a time as any to push the market higher."
Looking ahead, they predicted that the second quarter of 2005 was "the best opportunity for a substantial price decline."