Crude oil was little changed near $122 a barrel in New York after rising to a record yesterday on supply disruptions in Nigeria, Africa's largest producer.

Oil rose above $122 a barrel for the first time after Royal Dutch Shell Plc reported a militant attack on a pump station in Nigeria, where Shell is losing 164,000 barrels of crude a day. Crude may reach $125 this week on speculative buying, Libya's top oil official said.

``The uncertainty over future attacks goes to prop up prices,'' Michael Wittner, global head of oil research at Societe Generale SA, said during a Bloomberg Television interview in Mumbai. ``A surge of financial investor flows into commodities, and into oil'' has ``lifted prices up above the immediate fundamentals.''

Crude oil for June delivery traded at $121.68 a barrel, 16 cents lower, in electronic trading on the New York Mercantile Exchange at 9:44 a.m. London time.

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Yesterday, oil climbed to an intraday record of $122.73 a barrel. Futures advanced $1.87, or 1.6 percent, to settle at $121.84 a barrel, the highest close since trading began in 1983. Prices have surged 98 percent from a year earlier.

``There is no shortage of supply now, there is concern that there may be one and it may go to $125 by Friday,'' Shokri Ghanem, head of Libya's National Oil Corp., said today by phone. ``Speculations, political conflicts are pushing prices up.''

Brent crude oil for June settlement was at $120.26 a barrel, down 5 cents, on London's ICE Futures Europe exchange at 9:44 a.m. London time. Yesterday, the contract touched $120.99, a record intraday price.

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