Oil, gas prices fall Tuesday morning

New York -- Crude oil and gas prices notched lower again Tuesday, despite supply jitters.

A fire Friday at the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline, responsible for delivering nearly 1 million barrels of Caspian region oil a day to the Black Sea, and Russian-Georgian hostilities threatening the same pipeline has not interrupted six weeks of oil price declines.

The undeterred downward trend in spite of supply issues has given credence to the theory that speculators were propping up oil prices, which peaked above $145 per barrel July 3.

Oil dropped $1.44 in overnight trading on the New York Mercantile Exchange to $113.13 per barrel. Heating oil fell 0.0254 cents overnight to $3.0981 per gallon. Reformulated blendstock gasoline prices fell 0.067 cents to $2.8355 per gallon. Natural gas prices fell 0.02 cents to $8.39 per million British thermal units.

The national average retail price of unleaded gasoline fell 0.011 cent to $3.799 per gallon, the AAA Daily Fuel Gauge Report said.

Copyright 2008 by United Press International