Light, sweet crude for October delivery rose 9 cents to $67.59 a barrel in electronic trading on the New York Mercantile Exchange by midafternoon in Europe. The contract had fallen more than $1 Wednesday to settle at $67.50 a barrel _ the lowest closing price for front-month futures since April 7.
Brent crude for October delivery fell 4 cents to $66.89 a barrel on the ICE Futures exchange in London.
Heating oil prices gained 0.4 cent to $1.9150 a gallon, while gasoline rose 1 cent to $1.6500 a gallon. Natural gas futures declined 13.4 cents to $5.860 per 1,000 cubic feet.
Traders said the market would take its cue from the U.S. supply figures to be released later Thursday, a day later than usual because of the U.S. Labor Day holiday this week.
U.S. petroleum demand tends to fall after Labor Day, which marks the end of the summer school holidays.
Easing concerns about the threat to supplies posed by the Iranian nuclear dispute and the Atlantic hurricane season have prompted crude oil prices to fall by about 12 percent in the past month.
Analysts expect the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, which meets next week, to maintain its official output target of 28 million barrels per day. And they said if OPEC trims production in an attempt to prop up prices, the strategy could backfire because it would signal to a market that has worried for several years about tight supplies that the world finally has oil to spare.
Merrill Lynch said Thursday that upward pressure on prices would remain in the longer term. "We believe the anemic levels of distillation and upgrading capacity additions in '07 should serve to further tighten the global oil products demand/supply picture," Merrill Lynch said.
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