from Dow Jones:
Crude oil closed Monday at the highest point in 2 1/2 weeks, as traders looked past a dreary appraisal of longer-term oil demand and reacted to supply threats closer at hand.
Light, sweet crude for August delivery settled at $71.49 a barrel, up $2.33, or 3.4%, on the New York Mercantile Exchange. Brent crude on the ICE futures exchange settled at $70.99 a barrel, up $2.07, or 3%.
Nymex crude is up 60.3% in 2009. Monday's close was the highest settlement since June 12.
Buyers were galvanized by the latest reported production outage in Nigeria's strife-torn oil-producing region. Royal Dutch Shell PLC (RDSA) confirmed it was halting some output after militants claimed attacks on two clusters of wells at the company's Estuary field.
More than 700,000 barrels a day in Nigerian output has been halted due to civil unrest in the country, whose sustainable crude-production capacity totals about 2.6 million barrels a day, the International Energy Agency says. As Nigeria's president offers amnesty to rebels, a spokesman for the main militant group said Monday it set off a "massive explosion" at Shell's offshore Forcados production platform.
"The situation in Nigeria is not going away," said Christopher Mennis, president of brokerage New Wave Energy in Aptos, Calif. "It seems to be getting worse and worse."
