(UPDATE: Recasts with move upward in prices)
NEW YORK, Aug 30 (Reuters) - U.S. crude oil prices burst well over $33 a barrel on Wednesday amid ongoing supply concerns that overshadowed OPEC kingpin Saudi Arabia's suggestion it would seek a ``suitable'' production increase to ease the crunch.
Benchmark New York Mercantile Exchange (NYMEX) crude oil futures last traded at $33.29 a barrel, up 55 cents to the highest level seen since the end of June.
The level was more than $11 a barrel higher than last year at this time, and roughly $20 higher than the year before -- highlighting a U.S. supply situation that has been worsening since OPEC began closing the spigots on their oil wells in 1998.
According to U.S. supply data released Wednesday morning by the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA), crude oil stocks grew last week by two million barrels, but remained a mammoth 32 million barrels below last year's level.
Distillate supplies, which include barrels of home heating oil, were also in dire shape last week, according to the data, keeping steady and roughly 28 million barrels below last year's level. The starved inventories have highlighted concerns of extremely high heating oil prices this winter, eclipsing last season's ``Northeast heating oil crisis'' which prompted the Clinton Administration to release emergency funds to the poor.
The worries overshadowed a statement on Wednesday from Saudi Arabia's authoritative Supreme Petroleum Council, which said it wanted producer group OPEC to review its mechanism for stabilising world oil prices.
The statement was issued only days before the cartel's meeting in Vienna September 10.
Analysts, looking to OPEC to help avert the looming U.S. winter supply crunch, suggest an output increase decided at the meeting would have to be well above the expected 500,000 barrels per day (bpd) to have any significant impact in the
U.S.
``Any formal increase in OPEC's quotas under 700,000 barrels per day is unlikely to bring fresh oil onto the market, and will only end up legitimising existing over-production, as happened in March and June,'' said a report by Petroleum Finance Corp. (PFC) released Wednesday.
According to PFC,
Saudi Arabia alone has increased its exports by 300,000 bpd (equals 3,5% )
to a total 8.55 million = 8 550 000 bpd since early July,
which has done little to cool blazing U.S. oil prices.
Siehe www.stockcharts.com Chapter: market-summery crude-oil
hier könnt Ihr den aktuellen Rohölpreis-Chart downloaden.

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