Anchorage Daily News

Alaska oil prices on Tuesday closed above $140 a barrel for the first time.

Oil prices worldwide rose on worries about tight supply and mounting tensions in the Middle East. In the United States, prices at the gas pump edged to their highest point yet.

Crude prices resumed their advance as the head of the International Energy Agency said the world is experiencing its "third oil price shock," comparing the effects of today's prices with the oil crises that began with the 1973 Arab oil embargo and the 1979 revolution in Iran.

IEA chief Nobuo Tanaka added that OPEC is pumping oil at record levels and other producers "are working at full throttle." His comments reinforced the IEA's latest prediction that global supplies will remain pinched despite record prices and falling demand in the United States and Europe.

"Day-to-day market noise can be driven by speculators," Tanaka said. "High oil prices are driven by fundamentals."

Meanwhile, during a visit to Berlin, U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson said "there don't seem to be any obvious short-term solutions" to soaring oil prices.

Alaska North Slope oil closed at $140.07 a barrel on West Coast open markets. That was up 97 cents for the day.

Alaska prices started the year at $97 a barrel and have risen steadily since, gushing revenue into an already flush state treasury thanks to state ownership of the largest oil fields and a new tax on oil companies that captures more of the windfall as prices rise.

In the United States, gas station operators nudged the record for a gallon of regular to an average of $4.09 a gallon nationwide, according to AAA, the Oil Price Information Service and Wright Express.

In a weekly report Tuesday, MasterCard's Spending Pulse survey found that U.S. demand for gasoline fell 2.1 percent last week compared with the same week a year ago and is off by an average of 2.9 percent over the past four weeks.

The average Alaska price for regular gasoline was highest in the nation at $4.64 a gallon. The average price in Anchorage was $4.39, compared with $2.99 a gallon a year ago, according to AAA.

The Anchorage Daily News contributed to this article.

Oil price records

The dates that Alaska oil prices first crossed various per-barrel price thresholds:

$50 -- Oct. 14, 2004

$60 -- Aug. 5, 2005

$70 -- April 19, 2006

$80 -- Sept. 17, 2007

$90 -- Oct. 25, 2007

$100 -- Feb. 26, 2008

$110 -- March 13, 2008

$120 -- May 6, 2008

$130 -- May 21, 2008

$140 -- July 1, 2008

Source: Daily News research

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