Crude, Gasoline Prices Fall on Signs of Lower Demand

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rude oil and wholesale gasoline prices fell Tuesday on signs of lower demand, as the Gulf of Mexico region continued to struggle to recover from the effects of the recent hurricanes, Bloomberg reported.

Benchmark light sweet crude oil fell $1.57 to $63.90 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange, a two-week low, while wholesale gasoline fell almost a cent to $2.01 a gallon, Bloomberg reported.

Meanwhile, President Bush said during a Tuesday press conference that the country needs more oil refineries and that he wanted to work with Congress to streamline the permitting process for new refineries.

Separately, Interior Secretary Gale Norton said Tuesday that 108 oil and natural gas offshore platforms were destroyed by hurricanes Rita and Katrina and likely will not be rebuilt, Reuters reported.

She said the destroyed platforms account for about 1.5% of oil output in the Gulf of Mexico and 0.7% of Gulf natural gas production and that 90% of Gulf oil and 72% of natural gas production remained “shut in,” or down, following the two big storms.

While she said the government would give no official estimate of the dollar value of the storms, “it will clearly be in the billions” of dollars, Norton said.