Crude-oil futures edged higher in Asian trade Monday on reports of a fire at oil storage terminals at a Libyan oil terminal.

On the New York Mercantile Exchange, light, sweet crude futures for delivery in February traded at $55.37 a barrel at 0537 GMT, up $0.64 in the Globex electronic session. February Brent crude on London’s ICE Futures exchange rose $0.47 to $59.92 a barrel.

Nymex crude lost 4.20% last week and Brent crude was down by 3.14% last week. Both the oil benchmarks have fallen for five consecutive weeks.

“With persisting conflicts in Libya, crude export and production continue to be unstable. Current estimates of crude output in Libya stands at 352,000 barrels a day,” analyst Daniel Ang at Singapore’s Phillip Futures said.

He said for the past week both Nymex WTI and Brent crude were supported by short covering, but with 2015 just around the corner, these support levels are waning.

“We expect both WTI and Brent to continue to trade range bound,” Mr. Ang said, adding that towards the end of the week traders may start resuming their short positions, pushing prices down further.

Nymex reformulated gasoline blendstock for January–the benchmark gasoline contract–rose 71 points to $1.5158 a gallon, while January diesel traded at $1.9245, 166 points higher.