The West Texas Intermediate for October delivery added 95 cents to settle at 69.30 U.S. dollars a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange. Brent crude for November delivery increased 91 cents to close at 72.60 dollars a barrel on the London ICE Futures Exchange.
"Oil prices are continuing to find support from the ongoing high production outages in the Gulf of Mexico," Carsten Fritsch, energy analyst at Commerzbank Research, said in a note on Wednesday,
"As it could well take some weeks before production returns completely to normal, the cumulative outage is likely to become significantly bigger," he said, adding "because of this outage on the supply side, the global oil market is likely to be more undersupplied in the short term than previously anticipated."
The U.S. Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement on Wednesday estimated that approximately 76.88 percent of oil production in the Gulf of Mexico remained shut in, along with 77.25 percent of natural-gas production.
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