Mild weather in much of the Northern Hemisphere is dampening demand for heating oil and natural gas, however.
Light sweet crude for December delivery on the New York Mercantile Exchange rose 29 cents to $58.57 a barrel in electronic trading by midday in Europe.
On London's ICE Futures exchange, December Brent crude gained 30 cents to $59.14 a barrel. That contract expires later Wednesday.
After declining 25 percent from a summer peak above $78 a barrel, oil prices have hung close to the $60 level over the past month, even as the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries announced a 1.2 million barrel a day production cut and violence in Nigeria raised supply worries.
"For the first time in a while the market appears in a somewhat somnolent state: comfortable with current price levels and lulled by the lack of urgency from the geopolitical sphere," Mike Fitzpatrick, a vice president for energy risk management at Fimat USA, told Dow Jones Newswires.
Commodities analyst Mark Pervan, with Daiwa Securities in Melbourne, Australia, suggested the market was positioning ahead of the weekly U.S. inventories report, which comes out later Wednesday.
"Generally, most of the price catalysts for price taking are not active," Pervan said. "Instead we have mild winter weather in the United States, quiet in the Middle East and we're between OPEC meetings."
Vienna's PVM Oil Associates noted "the coming winter months could be milder than expected."
"According to the (U.S.) National Weather Service, heating oil consumption should be some 30 percent lower than average this week," PVM said. It added that "heating oil stocks in Germany, Europe's largest consumer, have been increasing markedly lately."
Last week showed declines in U.S. supplies of gasoline and diesel fuel, though oil and natural gas supplies are still ample _ above the average for this time of year.
Market participants are bracing for what could be another mixed report.
U.S. commercial crude inventories are expected to have risen by an average of 900,000 barrels in the week to Nov. 10, a Dow Jones survey of eight analysts showed.
Any bearish signal from this, however, is likely to be offset by a predicted 1 million-barrel drop in stocks of distillates, comprising diesel and heating oil.
In other Nymex trading, heating oil futures rose 0.48 cent to $1.66800 a gallon, and unleaded gas by more than a penny to $1.5570 a gallon. Natural gas futures were steady at $7.973 per 1,000 cubic feet.
Last week the International Energy Agency trimmed its outlook for 2006 global oil demand growth to 1.1 percent from 1.2 percent. The forecast for growth in demand for 2007 was maintained at 1.7 percent.
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