Oil prices regained ground Wednesday as the market adjusted to declines the day before and traders awaited release of the weekly U.S. inventory report.

Light sweet crude for December delivery rose 19 cents to US $58.47 a barrel in midmorning Asian electronic trading on the New York Mercantile Exchange. After declining 25 percent from a summer peak above $78 a barrel, oil prices have hung close to the $60 level over the past month, even as the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries announced a 1.2 million barrel a day production cut and violence in Nigeria raised supply worries.

Commodities analyst Mark Pervan, with Daiwa Securities in Melbourne, Australia, suggested the market was positioning ahead of the weekly U.S. inventories report, which comes out later Wednesday. Last week showed declines in U.S. supplies of gasoline and diesel fuel, though oil and natural gas supplies are still ample _ above the average for this time of year.

In other Nymex trading, heating oil futures rose less than a penny to US$1.6700 a gallon on the Nymex, while natural gas futures dropped 0.3 cent to US$7.974 per 1,000 cubic feet.