Sept. 20 (Bloomberg) -- Crude oil traded near a record close in New York on concern storms and declining imports may reduce U.S. supplies before demand peaks in the fourth quarter.

Oil jumped to $82.51 a barrel yesterday after a U.S. Energy Department report showed the nation's crude oil inventories fell 3.87 million barrels last week, almost twice the decline forecast by analysts. Producers including BP Plc and ConocoPhillips are evacuating non-essential workers from the Gulf of Mexico because of a possible tropical storm.

``People are worried about whether there'll be adequate supplies,'' said David Moore, a commodity strategist at Commonwealth Bank of Australia in Sydney. ``The drop in inventories was larger than most analysts were expecting, continuing the pattern recently of fairly hefty draws.''

Crude oil for October delivery was at $81.97 a barrel, up 4 cents, in after-hours electronic trading on the New York Mercantile Exchange at 11:34 a.m. in Singapore.

The contract, which expires at today's close, rose 42 cents, or 0.5 percent, to $81.93, the highest closing price since trading began in 1983. The more actively traded November contract was at $80.73 a barrel, down 12 cents.

U.S. oil stockpiles have fallen in 10 of the past 11 weeks as imports slipped to a six-month low. Imports averaged 9.9 million barrels a day the past month, 7 percent less than a year earlier, the Energy Department said yesterday.

Brent, Inventories

Brent crude oil for November settlement was at $78.20 a barrel, down 27 cents, on the London-based ICE Futures Europe exchange at 11:18 a.m. Singapore time. It rose 1.1 percent to $78.47 a barrel yesterday, the highest close since the contract began in 1989.

Inventories held 318.8 million barrels on Sept. 14, an eight-month low. A drop of 2.03 million barrels was expected, based on the median estimate from a Bloomberg News survey of 16 analysts.

Stockpiles at Cushing, Oklahoma, the delivery point for New York-traded West Texas Intermediate oil, fell 1.68 million barrels to 18.3 million last week, the report showed. That is the lowest since the week ended Dec. 2, 2005. Levels fell as refineries in the so-called PADD-2 region around Cushing increased last week the amount of crude they processed.

Overall U.S. refineries operated at 89.6 percent of capacity last week, down 1 percentage point from the week before, according to a report from the department. U.S. refiners often shut units for maintenance in September and October as gasoline demand falls and heating-oil use has yet to increase.

Storm Gathers

Oil prices have gained 11 percent this month as stockpiles declined and hurricanes threatened oil production in the Gulf of Mexico, home to about a quarter of U.S. oil output. September accounts for about a third of the storms and hurricanes forming in the North Atlantic annually, according to National Hurricane Center records.

A large weather disturbance over Florida may strengthen as it heads west into the Gulf, the center said.

``Pressures have continued to fall and the environment is gradually becoming favorable for a subtropical or tropical cyclone to form,'' the center said on its Web site.

Chevron Corp., Marathon Oil Corp. and Anadarko Petroleum Corp. joined BP and ConocoPhillips in evacuating non-essential employees from their rigs in the Gulf of Mexico because of the storm threat.

None of the 1.3 million barrels of oil and 7.7 billion cubic feet of gas estimated to be produced daily in the Gulf has been affected by the evacuations, the U.S. Minerals Management Service said in a statement yesterday. The Gulf accounts for about 25 percent of U.S. oil production and 14 percent of the nation's gas output.

To contact the reporters on this story: Angela Macdonald-Smith in Sydney at amacdonaldsm@bloomberg.net; Christian Schmollinger in Singapore at christian.s@bloomberg.net

Last Updated: September 19, 2007 23:49 EDT