Oil prices jumped Wednesday on supply concerns stoked by a new round of Turkish airstrikes in northern Iraq and a growing belief that domestic oil inventories fell last week, AP reported. Turkey's military said its warplanes bombed eight suspected Kurdish rebel positions in northern Iraq on Wednesday. It was the third Turkish strike inside Iraq in less than two weeks. Oil traders worry that the rebels could cut oil supplies from Iraq in retaliation. The new attacks came as oil investors awaited inventory data from the Energy Department's Energy Information Administration that is expected to show crude supplies fell by 1.2 million barrels last week, the sixth straight weekly decline. Light, sweet crude for February delivery rose $1.84 to $95.97 a barrel Wednesday on the New York Mercantile Exchange after earlier rising to $96.07, a one-month high. Trading in crude futures Wednesday was light, less than 10 percent of normal volume, meaning the sharp price move could be exaggerated, said Linda Rafield, senior oil analyst at Platts, the energy research arm of McGraw-Hill Cos. In its weekly report, the EIA is also expected to show that inventories of distillates, which include heating oil and diesel fuel, fell by 600,000 barrels last week, according to the average estimate of analysts surveyed by Dow Jones Newswires. Gasoline stockpiles are expected to rise by 1.6 million barrels, while refinery activity is expected to grow by 0.6 percentage point to 88.4 percent of capacity. Other energy futures were mixed Wednesday. January heating oil futures rose 6.48 cents to $2.6595 a gallon on the Nymex while January gasoline futures rose 7.26 cents to $2.4566 a gallon. January natural gas futures lost 3.1 cents to $6.994 per 1,000 cubic feet. In London, February Brent crude rose $1.87 to $94.57 a barrel on the ICE Futures exchange.
