From USA Today:
If you end up freezing (Venezuelan assets) and it harms us, we're going to harm you," Chavez said. "Do you know how? We aren't going to send oil to the United States."
Mike Fitzpatrick, vice president of energy and risk management at MF Global, says is is hard to weigh the comment. "How much credence you want to give him is always a question mark," Fitzpatrick said.
But traders were clearly worried about the potential cutoff of Venezuelan oil. Light, sweet crude for March delivery jumped $1.82 to settle at $93.59 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange after spiking to $94.72 earlier, a one-month high.
Word of power outages at a Valero Energy refinery in Delaware City, Del., and a Citgo Petroleum refinery in Lake Charles, La., also helped push prices higher. Both plants were being restarted Monday, Dow Jones Newswires reported.
Traders were unnerved by new violence in Nigeria, Africa's largest oil producer and a major supplier to the U.S. On Monday, gunmen attacked a naval vesselescorting petroleum industry boats, killing one sailor and injuring another. Militant attacks have cut Nigeria's oil output by nearly one quarter in the past two years, helping send oil prices to all-time highs.
Concerns about supply disruptions temporarily drew investors' focus from the weakening U.S. economy, which had been the market's dominant theme. Worries that the economy is slowing, and demand for energy is falling, pushed oil prices down from a record above $100 a barrel in early January to nearly $86 in recent weeks.
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