Oil rises on weaker dollar, supply concerns

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Oil rose on Monday on weakness in the U.S. dollar and concerns supplies could tighten as the United States and other consumer nations head into winter.

U.S. crude settled up 80 cents at $94.64 a barrel after striking $95.15 earlier. London Brent crude rose 66 cents to $92.28.

Oil has held close to the record $98.62 a barrel struck earlier this month, supported by worries of a supply shortfall during the Northern Hemisphere winter, a rise in speculative investment and the tumbling dollar.

A summit of the heads of state of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries ended on Sunday without strong signs as to whether the group will hike oil output to help ease high prices when it next meets on December 5 in Abu Dhabi.

During the OPEC summit, Venezuela and Iran -- both locked in diplomatic rows with Washington -- called for the cartel to take action to offset the falling greenback, which can eat away at revenues from dollar-denominated oil sales.

While OPEC did not mention the weak dollar in its final statement from the meeting, traders are looking for signals the group could seek higher prices to offset the fall.

"OPEC talk about prices being undervalued and its concern with the falling dollar are all filtering into the market," said Mark Pervan of ANZ Bank in Melbourne. "There are pockets of bullish news out in the market and no bearish news at all."

Talk that oil exporters could next month discuss abandoning their fixed exchange rates to the dollar helped push the dollar lower on Monday.

Barclays Capital analysts said oil prices were receiving "strong support from underlying tightness, though sentiment appears to be suffering from a slight resurgence of demand pessimism."

Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said the market price of oil was still undervalued, despite concerns that rising energy costs could damp demand growth from consumer nations.

Speculators on the New York Mercantile Exchange crude oil market cut their net long positions last week, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission said.

Net speculative crude positions fell to 27,566 in the week to November 13 from 105,816 in the previous week, which analysts at Barclays Capital said was the largest fall on record.

(Reporting by Matthew Robinson in New York, Randy Fabi and Santosh Menon in London and Fayen Wong in Sydney; Editing by Christian Wiessner)