OIL prices are not likely to be affected by mere anticipation for the most active hurricane season in five years.

A rough hurricane season threatens refineries and pipelines, a picture which some may presume would influence speculative traders to send oil prices higher in anticipation of supplies being affected. But that’s not the case, says Dr Raymond Wright, consultant and former group managing director of the Petroleum Corporation of Jamaica

“Speculators on oil pricing do not put a premium on hurricane risk until they happen,” said Wright.

“They react accordingly but they do not react prior to this,” he said, adding that a hurricane would have to be in the Gulf of Mexico, “like a Katrina”, to impact oil prices.

“Then there will be an increase in oil prices, but that will be a reaction to an event and not a prediction of an event,” he said.

US forecasters say up to eight hurricanes and 16 named tropical storms are likely to form in the Atlantic basin during the 2010 hurricane season, which they say would make it the worst since 2005.

Oil prices slid Friday after heavy weekly losses on concerns over the European debt crisis, the sustainability of the US economic recovery and the strengthening dollar. New York’s main contract, light sweet crude for delivery in July, fell 76 cents to close at US$70.04 a barrel, according to the AFP.

“The issue with oil prices at the moment really, concerns the problems that we are having in Europe, with the Euro being weak,” Wright told Sunday Finance.

“So we now have a very strong US dollar, and whenever you have a strong US dollar versus other currencies, especially the Euro, you have lower oil prices,” he said.