Benchmark West Texas Intermediate crude for March delivery rose 84 cents to $85.16 a barrel in afternoon trading on the New York Mercantile Exchange.

In London, Brent crude rose $2.20 to $103.84 per barrel on the ICE Futures exchange.

Analyst Fadel Gheit noted that the regime change in Egypt could bleed into other countries and cause supply disruptions.

Crude prices rose even though oil supplies grew in the US, the world’s largest petroleum consumer.

The Energy Department said Wednesday that crude supplies grew by 900,000 barrels, or 0.2 percentage point, to 345.9 million barrels for the week ended Feb. 11. The total was 3.4 percent more than a year ago.

Meanwhile, gasoline pump prices reached a 28-month high Wednesday even though gas supplies in the US continue to grow and demand for gas is weak.

The US average for regular gasoline rose to $3.133 a gallon. That’s about $1.20 a gallon more than the price at the pump two years ago, according to AAA, Wright Express and the Oil Price Information Service.

Higher gas prices are a result of several factors that have created a bottleneck for supplies of West Texas Intermediate crude stored at Cushing, Oklahoma, which is the delivery point for oil traded on the Nymex.

More North American oil is being produced and delivered to the Cushing facility, but existing pipelines can’t move all of the crude out to refineries. And there are no pipelines to Gulf coast refineries, which have the capacity to produce about half the nation’s daily supply of gasoline.

In addition, the price of Brent crude, used by refineries on the US East Coast, is soaring. Although it is produced in Europe’s North Sea, Brent is used to price oil produced in other parts of the world, including South America and Africa, which is shipped to refineries in the US.

In other Nymex trading, heating oil rose 5 cents to $2.7771 a gallon and gasoline gained 4 cents to $2.5325 a gallon. Natural gas lost 1 cent at $3.970 per 1,000 cubic feet.