(Updates prices, StatoilHydro comments, analyst's comment)
By Fayen Wong
PERTH, May 26 (Reuters) - Oil rose towards $133 a barrel on Monday, extending the previous session's gains on a supply outage at the Statfjord oilfield in the North Sea and a weak U.S. dollar.
U.S. light crude for July delivery <CLc1> rose 61 cents to $132.80 a barrel by 0556 GMT, extending Friday's gains of $1.38. It struck a record high of $135.09 in intraday trade last week.
London Brent crude <LCOc1> rose 43 cents to $132.
"It's very much the U.S. currency at play. The market is re-assessing the dollar and has probably taken the view that the dollar hasn't bottomed out and may fall further," said Mark Pervan, a senior commodities analyst at the Australia & New Zealand (ANZ) Bank.
The U.S. dollar steadied near one-month lows against a basket of major currencies on Monday, after falling late last week on concerns that surging oil prices could further slow the U.S. economy. [
]Norwegian oil and gas producer StatoilHydro <STL.OL>, which had shut its North Sea oil fields with a capacity of about 138,000 barrels per day (bpd) on Saturday due to an oil spill, said on Monday it has restarted production at two fields, but its 19,000 bpd Statfjord A field was still shut in. [
]Longer-term worries that supply will struggle to keep up with demand over the next few years also continue to support prices.
OPEC Secretary-General Abdullah al-Badri said on Friday he was not worried about reports of faster-than-expected depletion in the world's biggest oil fields and repeated his position that runaway oil prices were caused by speculation and not by supply problems. [
]A Reuters survey last week showed that non-OPEC production had stagnated and would remain below 50 million barrels per day this year. [
]Other OPEC member the United Arab Emirates said on Sunday it was ready to boost oil output if necessary.
"We are always happy to put more oil in the market if the market needs more," UAE Oil Minister Mohammed al-Hamli told Reuters when asked if UAE would raise supply with the Saudis. Hamli declined to say if the UAE planned to boost output in June. [
]Oil prices have climbed by around a third since the start of the year as investors seeking a hedge against inflation and the falling U.S. dollar pile into commodities.
Concern that record oil prices could dent global demand was the key downside risk.
European Central Bank President Jean-Claude Trichet said the potential economic fallout from financial market turmoil, along with rising food and commodity prices, could shock the economy further, while Vice President Lucas Papademos said inflation pressures had intensified due to rising oil prices, which were also dampening growth [
] [ ].In the U.S., data released on Friday showed that highway miles driven in March fell 4.3 percent from a year earlier, the first time this has happened in March since the last major oil shock in 1979.
Road travel during the Memorial Day holiday over the weekend was expected to be 1 percent lower than last year, the first such decline since 2002. (Reporting by Fayen Wong; Editing by Clarence Fernandez)