Crude oil rises on U.S. reserve plans

NEW YORK, Jan. 23 (UPI) -- Crude oil prices rose nearly 5 percent Tuesday to settle above $55 a barrel on news Washington would seek to more than double U.S. petroleum reserves.

Light, sweet crude for March delivery settled up $1.46 or 4.7 percent at $55.04 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange.

U.S. Energy Secretary Sam Bodman said President George W. Bush planned to call for a more-than-doubling of the country's emergency oil reserves in his State of the Union address Tuesday night.

The U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve capacity would be raised to 1.5 billion barrels from its current 727 million barrels, with Washington buying 100,000 barrels of oil a day to expand the stockpile starting this spring, Bodman said in a conference call with reporters.

Natural gas futures closed up 27.8 cents at $7.597 per 1,000 cubic feet, after reaching a high of $7.60, a level it had not reached since Dec. 14. Heating oil closed at $1.5763 a gallon, up 6.79 cents. Reformulated gasoline blendstock for oxygen blending, or RBOB, closed up 7.19 cents or 5.2 percent at $1.4473 a gallon.

AAA said Tuesday the average U.S. retail regular-unleaded gasoline price was $2.158 a gallon, 0.03 cents more than Monday.