FEARS are mounting that Europe and America face a long period of high petrol prices after it was revealed that a release of emergency fuel stocks would contain only small quantities of petrol, insufficient to make up the supply shortfall caused by Hurricane Katrina.

The International Energy Agency (IEA) disclosed yesterday that a planned release over one month of 2.1 million barrels a day of oil products from the emergency stocks of its member countries would include only 369,000 barrels of petrol. The total amount of extra petrol that the IEA is offering the market, worth about 11 million barrels, is little more than America consumes in one day.

According to estimates by Barclays Capital, the likely shutdown of several key US refineries for the next two to three months will leave a shortfall of up to 60 million barrels of petrol. In an attempt to tackle this, the White House has asked all US refiners to put off planned maintenance and maximise their output of fuel.

The continuing petrol crisis is worrying the US Department of Energy, which said it was unclear when normal production would resume at Gulf Coast refineries. David Garman, the department’s under-secretary, said that the hurricane had occurred during a period of already tight markets. “We are concerned about the impact of higher gasoline prices on the average American,” he said.

The average US pump price, which hit $3.07 a gallon last week, is within a whisker of its record high in 1981 of $3.11, adjusted for inflation. The US Energy Information Administration said that American winter heating bills would jump this year by about 71 per cent and energy costs would take a larger share of the US economy than at any time for two decades. It predicted that crude prices would remain above $62 into next year.

Claude Mandil, IEA director-general, said it would consider extending the 30-day emergency fuel supply by an extra month.

However, the crude oil price dipped further yesterday, losing a dollar to $64.80 in New York, while petrol prices began to rise again — another indication that the market has no appetite for the IEA’S extra crude oil but is in chronic need of more petrol.

“We have masses of crude oil but we are still very short of gasoline,” Paul Horsnell, of Barclays Capital, said. Oil-consuming countries created emergency buffer stocks in the 1970s when the main threat was perceived to be supply disruption from crude producers.

Mr Horsnell said: “They never thought that the supply risk would be in consuming countries.”

According to Mr Horsnell, America was already severely short of petrol before Katrina struck. “There was no slack in the system,” he said. Three Gulf coast refineries, belonging to Chevron, Murphy and ConocoPhillips, are thought to have suffered extensive damage when they were hit.

It is thought that repairs to those units, and another ExxonMobil facility, could take months. The threat of high petrol prices to European economies will be high on the agenda of the EU’s finance ministers when they meet in Manchester tomorrow.

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