U.S. Heating Oil Prices Up This Thanksgiving

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Americans are paying slightly higher prices this Thanksgiving to warm their homes with heating oil than they did last year, the Energy Department said on Wednesday.

The nationwide heating oil price of $2.75 a gallon was up 3.4 cents a gallon from a year ago and up 0.3 cent from the previous week, according to the Energy Information Administration's weekly survey of U.S. heating fuel costs.

EIA, the Energy Department's analytical arm, said District of Columbia residents again paid the highest retail price paid for home heating oil, at $3.14 a gallon.

The next highest prices were in New York at $2.92 a gallon, New Jersey at $2.86 and Massachusetts at $2.80.

The lowest price for heating oil was in Nebraska at $2.40 a gallon, followed by Iowa at $2.43, Kentucky at $2.45 and Wisconsin at $2.48.

The EIA said there will still be plenty of heating oil supplies this winter even with U.S. oil refiners operating at lower levels and some expected to shut down for maintenance.

"Refinery outages are not expected to create significant price pressure by reducing supplies below levels necessary to meet projected petroleum demand this winter," the agency said.

The EIA said U.S. heating oil inventories totaled 51.6 million barrels at the end of last week, down 100,000 barrels from the week before but up 10.2 million from a year ago.

While consumers are paying more for heating oil this Thanksgiving, they will be using less of it. Demand for heating oil is expected to be about 21 percent below normal this week as temperatures will be above average in most of the country, according to government weather forecasters.

About 8 million American residences use heating oil, a small portion of total U.S. households, but about a third of the homes in the Northeast depend on it as their main heating fuel.