Crude oil price climbed Thursday to near 70 dollars while gasoline futures settled with the highest closing price since trading began in 1984, more than double from ayear ago, amid worries about the disruption to refineries and crude output by Hurricane Katrina.

Light sweet crude for October delivery settled at 69.47 dollarsa barrel, up 53 cents on the New York Mercantile Exchange. London Brent crude rose 70 cents to 67.72 dollars a barrel on the International Petroleum Exchange.

NYMEX gasoline futures surged for a fourth day, settling up 15.37 cents at 2.409 dollars a gallon, the highest closing price since the contract began trading in 1984, although the US government said it would release oil from its Strategic Petroleum Reserve to help refineries short of crude after Hurricane Katrina.The October contract has risen 25 percent this week. Prices are more than double from a year ago.

Eight refineries, about 10 percent of the nation's refining capacity, remain shut for a fifth day because of the flooding and blackouts after. Some of them could take months to restart, according to the US Department of Energy said, while 20 rigs or platforms were adrift, listing sunk or missing and some 95 percentof the Gulf of Mexico's oil output was out of service.

US President George W Bush told Americans he expected close ally Saudi Arabia to do "everything it can" to provide the United States with more oil and said there would be zero tolerance of price gouging at the gasoline pump.

Source: Xinhua