Mexico shutting 600,000 bpd oil output due cold front

MEXICO CITY (Reuters) - Mexico's state-owned oil company Pemex was shutting down about one-fifth of its daily output on Sunday due to bad weather, but said it expects to quickly resume output within days.

U.S. crude oil futures jumped as much as 1 percent to a record high $92.79 a barrel on news of the outage, which traders fear could put further strain on winter fuel supplies in the United States, Mexico's main customer.

A Pemex spokesman, Carlos Ramirez, said the bad weather was expected to last two days and that Pemex should be able to "immediately" resume production once it passes, adding that it had not evacuated any workers from platforms.

Pemex said it had already shut wells with about 200,000 barrels per day (bpd) of production and would close another 400,000 bpd of production in the coming hours as a cold front hits the Gulf of Mexico area.

The country's three main oil exporting ports were all closed on Sunday.

Pemex's move came days after a storm killed at least 21 oil workers and closed the main oil exporting ports of Coatzacoalcos, Dos Bocas and Cayo Arcas.

The disruption resulted in an inventory build-up at those ports and, with the new cold front in the Gulf, Pemex said it would not be able to move oil from the wells to the ports.

"The thing is we can't move the product," Ramirez said.

The government said the ports were closed again on Sunday.