LONDON, Aug 11: Oil prices rebounded on Friday as markets shrugged off concerns raised by a thwarted plot to destroy planes flying to the United States, analysts said.

In London, Brent North Sea crude for September delivery climbed 32 cents to $75.60 per barrel in electronic deals, having closed down $2 on Thursday.

New York's main contract, light sweet crude for delivery in September, gained 35 cents $74.35 per barrel in pit trading on Friday. The contract had tumbled 2.25 dollars Thursday.

According to Barclays Capital analyst Kevin Norrish, Thursday's price falls were “overdone”.

He added: “The logic usually employed by analysts after such an incident is that prices should fall because of the danger of reductions in travel demand, and because a loss in consumer confidence could cause economic weakness which could reduce oil demand. It is very difficult, in our view, to see the current incident as impacting on travel demand sufficiently to be able to affect prices at the global level.”

Prices continued falling after Anglo-Dutch energy giant Royal Dutch Shell said on Friday it was regaining 173,000 barrels per day of crude output after plugging a pipeline leak in southern Nigeria.

News of the fixed pipeline meant that Nigerian crude output is still reduced by around 620,000 barrels per day, or 24 per cent of capacity, due to militant attacks in the Niger Delta.

Traders also monitored concerns ranging from Israel's offensive in Lebanon, Iran's defiance of Western efforts to curb its uranium enrichment, and potential hurricane damage to oil installations in the US Gulf of Mexico.

“In this oil market today, there are many moving parts and the markets will remain very volatile reacting to short-term world events,” said Victor Shum, a Singapore-based analyst with energy consultancy Purvin and Gertz.

“The market still has more upside than downside,” he added.

Meanwhile, the International Energy Agency Traders published its latest oil market review.

The IEA held its estimate of world oil product demand unchanged at 84.8 million barrels per day this year and said the market had a thin cushion to absorb supply disruptions in Alaska and elsewhere.

“For the time being, the market can cope with current outages,” the Paris-based organisation said.

It added that the impact of disruption to supplies from the BP field in Prudhoe Bay, Alaska, would probably be substantially less than the 400,000 barrels per day reported because of offsetting factors elsewhere.

BP said on Thursday that it was still producing 120,000 barrels of oil per day from the stricken field and hoped to keep some output operational.—AFP