Oil prices jumped by more than $1 per barrel Wednesday, after the U.S. government reported an unexpected drop in crude oil inventories last week.

Light, sweet crude for April delivery surged $1.12 to $61.81 a barrel in morning trading on the New York Mercantile Exchange.

Brent crude for April delivery spiked $1.01 to $62.40 a barrel on London's ICE Futures Exchange.

The U.S. Energy Information Administration said crude oil stockpiles fell by 4.8 million barrels to 324.2 million barrels last week. Analysts, on average, had been expecting an increase in crude inventories of 2 million barrels, according to a Dow Jones Newswires survey.

Total gasoline inventories fell by 3.8 million barrels to 216.4 million barrels, a sharper decline than the 1.4 million barrel drop that analysts had expected.

Distillate fuel inventories, which include diesel and heating oil, fell by 1.3 million barrels to 123.2 million, compared with the 2.3 million barrel slide analysts had expected.

Heating oil futures rose 2.07 cents to $1.768 a gallon and natural gas gained less than a penny to $7.475 per 1,000 cubic feet. Gasoline futures rose 2.92 cents to $1.8825.

Also buoying crude prices was a U.S. Energy Information Administration's short-term energy outlook released Tuesday. The EIA predicted that oil demand will be 2.7 percent higher in the first quarter of 2007 than the same period a year ago, and that natural gas demand will surge 11 percent this year from 2006.