Crude Oil prices rose more than 1% on Monday to around $89.35 a barrel, after a weekend leak shut the Trans-Alaska Pipeline and forced producers to cut output to about 5% of their daily average of 630,000 barrels.
The discovery of a leak at a pump station booster in Prudhoe Bay on Saturday shut the Alaska pipeline, which carries nearly 12% of domestic crude output. Alaskan regulators said on Monday they had no restart timetable yet, but the plan was to build a bypass line and use it to restart the system. Speculators are assessing what impact this will have on oil prices, but for the moment the price appears to be continuing its previous bullishness.
