SINGAPORE — Oil prices fell slightly to near $102 a barrel Thursday in Asia, pausing a 36 percent rally during the last six weeks. Benchmark crude for December delivery was down 39 cents at $102.20 a barrel at midday Singapore time in electronic trading on the New York Mercantile Exchange. The contract rose $3.22 to settle at $102.59 in New York on Wednesday. Brent crude for January delivery slumped 54 cents to $111.34 a barrel on the ICE Futures Exchange in London. Oil has soared from $75 on Oct. 4 amid signs the U.S. economy is growing slowly — rather than slipping into a recession as some analysts feared during the summer. Oil prices jumped Wednesday after Canadian pipeline company Enbridge announced it would ship crude away from a key delivery point in Cushing, Oklahoma. The company bought a 50 percent stake in the Seaway pipeline from ConocoPhillips and plans to use it to transport oil from Cushing to refineries along the Gulf Coast, where much of it will be shipped overseas because of rising demand from Latin America. The benchmark U.S. crude is West Texas Intermediate, or WTI. "The belief that rising domestic production is flooding Cushing dictated the fate of WTI for most of the year," Barclays Capital said in a report. "This is where the reversal of Seaway has a huge totemic significance, in its ability to debottleneck Cushing." J.P. Morgan raised its 2012 forecast for the average price of crude to $110 from $97.50. In other Nymex trading, heating oil fell 0.9 cent to $3.13 per gallon and gasoline futures slid 2.6 cents to $2.61 per gallon. Natural gas gained 0.2 cent at $3.35 per 1,000 cubic feet.
