Oil and Gas Prices Jump

Oil and gas prices con­tin­ued to climb as frigid win­try weath­er choked off wells and refiner­ies and shut-in nat­ur­al gas pro­duc­tion in Texas and Okla­homa and left mil­lions of peo­ple with­out power.

West Texas Inter­me­di­ate crude oil rose 19 cents to $59.66 per bar­rel while nat­ur­al gas climbed 21.3 cents, or 7.31%, to $3.125 per thou­sand cubic feet. RBOB gaso­line was high­er by 6.2 cents to $1.7545 per gallon.

“This is a tem­po­rary event,” said Stew­art Glick­man, ana­lyst at CFRA Research. High­er prices will “per­sist until we can get past black­out stages, pow­er lines get repaired and things get back to normal.”

The icy weath­er con­di­tions have knocked about 3 mil­lion bar­rels of crude oil pro­duc­tion, or about 15% of U.S. out­put, offline. At the same time, nat­ur­al gas pro­duc­tion has been shut-in and the frac­tion­a­tors that turn nat­ur­al gas liq­uids into propane are see­ing increased demand. Shares of nat­ur­al gas pro­duc­ers rose in tan­dem with prices.

Parts of Texas will con­tin­ue to see below-nor­mal tem­per­a­tures through at least the mid­dle of this week with up to six inch­es of snow expect­ed into Thurs­day morn­ing. Tem­per­a­tures are cur­rent­ly in the sin­gle dig­its with wind chills expect­ed to fall to 15 degrees below zero.

In neigh­bor­ing Okla­homa, thou­sands are with­out pow­er as low tem­per­a­tures and inad­e­quate nat­ur­al gas sup­plies caused the Okla­homa Gas & Elec­tric Co. to ini­ti­ate its own rolling blackouts.