* Brent on track to 6 pct rise on week; WTI 4 pct
* Investors weigh tighter global supply vs Cushing build
* Nigeria crude outage also boosts prices
(New throughout, updates prices, market activity and comments
to settlement)
By Barani Krishnan
NEW YORK, May 12 (Reuters) - Oil prices rose 1 percent in
volatile trade on Thursday, with U.S. crude hitting six-month
highs as investors weighed a forecast for tighter global
supplies against signs of another storage build at the hub for
U.S. crude futures.
Worries of a major outage in Nigerian crude also boosted the
market, some traders said.
"It was a mixed bag, with both longs and shorts trying to
defend positions based on the data that appealed most to them.
The bulls prevailed," said Phil Flynn, analyst at the Price
Futures Group in Chicago.
Brent crude futures LCOc1 settled up 48 cents at $48.08
per barrel.
U.S. crude's West Texas Intermediate (WTI) futures CLc1
rose 47 cents to settle at $46.70. It hit a six-month high of
$47.02.
With that, Brent was on track for a weekly rise of 6 percent
and WTI 4 percent, continuing a broad uptrend that has added
about $20 to a barrel from lows in January and February.
WTI could advance to almost $51 in the near-term "on pure
technical merits", said Jim Ritterbusch of Chicago-based oil
markets consultancy Ritterbusch & Associates.
"But from a longer-term perspective, we still see this
market setting up for a hard fall next month" from a potential
dollar rally or weak Chinese economic data, he added.
WTI initially rallied early, after the International Energy
Agency raised its 2016 global oil demand growth forecast to 1.2
million barrels per day (bpd) from 1.16 million in April.
Brent also jumped as the IEA noted a combined decline of
450,000 bpd in Nigerian, Libyan and Venezuelan output from a
year ago.
Prices then slid on data from market intelligence firm
Genscape that showed a stockpile build of 548,923 barrels at the
Cushing, Oklahoma delivery hub for WTI futures during the week
to May 10. Cushing is one of the most closely watched datapoints
for WTI.
Some traders said a stronger dollar .DXY also pressured
oil. The dollar rose about 0.3 percent against a basket of
currencies, making greenback-denominated oil more expensive to
holders of other currencies.
But oil prices rebounded late and settled up.
Some traders cited reduced production in Nigeria's benchmark
Qua Iboe BFO-QUA crude. Nigeria is Africa's largest oil
producer and Qua Iboe the largest crude grade, set to account
for 317,000 bpd of exports in June. It was not immediately clear
by how much of the output was reduced by the pipeline problem.
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