Bloomberg staffer

Six European countries, including Austria, Italy and Romania, approved a plan for a pipeline to ship oil from the Caspian Sea region to western Europe, officials said Friday.

Total output rose 1 percent to the equivalent of 3.91 million barrels of oil a day as Chief Executive Officer Lee R. Raymond added production from the $3.4 billion Kizomba A project in deep waters off the coast of Angola. Other projects began producing in the past year in the North Sea and off Equatorial Guinea.
The impact of new projects was almost outweighed by a 14 percent drop in U.S. gas output, asset sales and production- sharing contracts under which the company gets fewer barrels of crude from certain fields as prices rise.

Third-quarter oil output fell 7.6 percent from a year earlier, and natural-gas production slid 5.9 percent, partly because of asset sales, ConocoPhillips said.
Oil production rose from wells in Vietnam and the Timor Sea and declined everywhere else, the company said. Gas output fell everywhere the company did business except Norway and Vietnam.

Crude oil prices, which rose to a record US$55 a barrel in New York on Friday, may increase further and peak at US$75 a barrel, said Bernard Dan, president of the Chicago Board of Trade, the second-biggest US futures market.

U.S. oil production plunged to a 54-year low after Hurricane Ivan slashed through the Gulf of Mexico two weeks ago, sinking rigs, buckling pipelines and triggering underwater mudslides that sheared the legs off platforms.

OPEC ministers said yesterday that they will increase oil production, allowing members to pump at will and bypass the quota system that has governed supplies for most of the past two decades.