NEW YORK, Jan 11 (AFP) - World oil prices rose Tuesday in cautious trade ahead of Iraqi general elections and a meeting of OPEC, feared to be considering an output cut.
New York's main contract, light sweet crude for delivery in February, rose 35 cents to 45.68 dollars a barrel. Brent North Sea crude for February climbed 20 cents to 43.12 dollars.
"The market is in a lull," said Refco market analyst Marshall Steeves.
Traders were awaiting both the Iraqi elections and a meeting of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries in Vienna, each falling on January 30, the analyst said.
"I don't think market will sell off ahead of the OPEC meeting because of the likelihood of a production cut-back if prices come off substantially," Steeves said.
Weekly surveys of the US commercial petroleum inventory are due Wednesday. Steeves predicted they would show a drop in stocks of crude oil, a rise in distillates such as heating oil and an increase in gasoliine.
Prices had soared nearly two dollars a barrel on Monday before sliding Tuesday as investors locked away profits.
"The oil price is all over the place," said Bruce Evers, an analyst at Investec Securities in London.
"The volatility is extremely high, people are still nervous.
"The northern pipelines are pretty much out of action in Iraq; cold weather is coming to the States at the end of the week; OPEC is probably looking to cut production at the end of the month (and) there are problems at several fields in the North Sea."
Attacks on oil and electricity infrastructure have cost Iraq 10 billion dollars in revenue, interim Prime Minister Iyad Allawi told state-run Al-Iraqiya television on Tuesday.
"Some of these losses resulted from attacks on oil pipelines feeding storage areas as well as attacking oil tankers carrying imported gasoline" to Iraq, he said.
Iraq's oil exports from the south resumed Sunday after sabotage attacks on power distribution lines in the area halted pumping at terminals in Basra, the oil ministry said.
But continuous sabotage in the north have prevented exports from the Kirkuk oil fields to the Turkish port of Ceyhan.
Traders tracked the run-up to the OPEC gathering.
"OPEC spent 2004 successfully proving that they could rebuild inventories and its spare capacity, taking oil prices down 10 dollars, so far, in the process," said Deutsche Bank analyst JJ Traynor in London.
"OPEC's December cuts point to a strategy to defend mid-30 dollars oil prices. From here, there are upside wildcards -- especially Iraq, refining margins and OPEC's January meeting -- but the fundamentals are less bullish for 2005, taking the fizz out of the oil sector," he wrote in a note to clients.
The 11-member cartel agreed in Cairo last month to reduce production by one million barrels a day from the start of 2005 to bring the group closer to its official output ceiling of 27 million barrels.
OPEC ministers said then that they were ready to reduce output again if needed to mop up excess supply in anticipation of a seasonal downturn in demand as the northern hemisphere winter ends.
Supply disruptions in the North Sea were also worrying traders. Oil giant Shell on Friday shut down crude oil production at its North Sea Draugen field as storms prevented repair work.
The Draugen field produces around 140,000 barrels a day.
Norwegian oil group Statoil has meanwhile requested permission to gradually resume production on two platforms in the North Sea that were shut down last November due to a gas leak, targeting a production of 100,000 barrels per day in the short term, the company said Tuesday.
01/11/2005 21:22 GMT - AFP