Oil prices rose Wednesday, ahead of a weekly report on U.S. inventories that is expected to show that crude oil and petroleum product stockpiles rose. An oil spill in the North Sea also may have rattled some nerves.

Light, sweet crude for January delivery on the New York Mercantile Exchange rose 80 cents to $90.82 a barrel in electronic trading by afternoon in Europe.
In London, January Brent crude rose 73 cents to $90.72 a barrel on the ICE Futures exchange.
""The market will be looking for confirmation that the crude oil stocks draws of last week were only due to fog delays and is pricing a rebound in crude stocks in the DOE report,"" said Olivier Jakob of Switzerland's Petromatrix.
The average forecast of analysts polled by Dow Jones Newswires was for the U.S. Energy Department's Energy Information Administration report to show that crude supplies grew by 100,000 barrels.
Gasoline inventories were estimated to increase 1.2 million barrels. Distillate stocks, which include diesel and heating oil, were tipped to rise 300,000 barrels, the survey showed.
Heating oil futures rose 2.2 cents to $2.45 a gallon on the Nymex, while gasoline prices increased 1.48 cents to $2.3062 a gallon. Natural gas futures added 10.2 cents to $7.187 per 1,000 cubic feet.
A spill of as much 25,000 barrels of oil in the North Sea on Wednesday, some 125 miles from the coast of Norway also may have contributed to higher prices.
The mishap occurred while loading crude from the Statfjord Alpha drilling platform to an oil tanker, field operator StatoilHydro ASA said. The cause of the spill was not immediately known but the loading had immediately been stopped, said StatoilHydro spokesman Vegar Stokset. He said production from the field was not affected because tanker loading is a separate operation.
Prices had dropped earlier Wednesday on reports that pipelines shut by an ice storm in the U.S. Midwest had been restarted.
An ice storm that caused outages of key U.S. oil pipelines helped drive oil prices up by more than $2 a barrel in the previous session. But Dow Jones Newswires reported that at least one of the pipelines — some of which serve the closely watched New York Mercantile Exchange delivery terminal at Cushing, Oklahoma — had been quickly restarted and that three others soon would be.
""Yesterday's $2 increase was primarily driven by the rather severe ice storm that knocked out power around Cushing,"" said Victor Shum, an energy analyst with Purvin & Gertz in Singapore.
""But that's just a short-term weather thing, no real disruption there, so that's why the oil price is edging down some,"" he said.
While traders saw the U.S. Federal Reserve's decision Tuesday to cut its federal funds rate by one-quarter of a percentage point to 4.25 percent as a move that will help the U.S. economy — the world's top oil consumer — and bolster demand for crude, many were hoping for a larger, half-point cut.
The larger cut would have been more of a boost to U.S. economic growth and would have weakened the dollar further, both factors that support oil prices. After the Fed settled for the smaller move, oil prices fell from Tuesday's highs and kept falling in after-hours trading.
""There is concern that the quarter-percentage-point cut in interest rates by the U.S. central bank may not be sufficient to improve the economic status in the country,"" said Vienna's PVM Oil Associates.
(Source: AP)