"Interest is purely centered on the explosion this morning," said a London-based broker. "If it hadn't happened the market would have come off some more, as it was looking pretty fragile last night."
Crude futures prices soared Thursday after a pipeline exporting close to 2 million b/d of crude and products from Canada to the US was shut down by an explosion. Front-month WTI on the New York Mercantile Exchange rose by more than $4/barrel on news of the incident, taking prices back above $95/b after the sharp falls earlier in the week.

"Having strategic oil reserves in place to cope with disruptions is an important insurance policy against such exposure,"
The IEA's Executive Director Nobuo Tanaka said Thursday in a statement. The Paris-based International Energy Agency Thursday said it is ready to tap into its 4.1 billion barrels of strategic oil reserves in the event of a supply disruption. Tanaka said IEA member countries currently hold stocks equivalent to about 122 days of net imports and constantly review and fine-tune their emergency response mechanisms.

Updated: November 29, 2007