Heating Oil Prices Higher, Supplies Tight : Energy: Extremely cold, icy weather has made it hard for barges to unload their oil cargoes in some East Coast harbors.

The cold snap gripping much of the nation is draining supplies of home heating oil, raising prices and causing spot shortages of the fuel, industry officials said Thursday.

Consumers are paying as much as $1 a gallon in parts of the Northeast, and some oil companies are taking steps to ensure there’s enough oil to go around.

Exxon USA, Mobil Corp. and Star Enterprise, a Texaco Inc. affiliate, reported some of their Northeastern terminals suffered temporary cuts in oil supply and that customers have been sent to other facilities or forced to wait for new supplies to arrive.

“These outages . . . have been maybe for a few hours,” said Exxon spokesman Jim Davis, who said customers at the company’s Everett, Mass., terminal were directed to nearby Waltham, where supplies were more plentiful.

At Mobil, spokesman John Lord estimated that some customers in the Northeast were kept waiting an hour for heating oil to arrive by barge or pipeline, but “that is not the norm. The norm is no outages.”

The wait was longer at Star Enterprise’s East Hartford, Conn., terminal, which ran out of oil Thursday and was hoping for a delivery today or Saturday, said Texaco spokesman Top Ingram.

The companies placed the blame for the shortages squarely on the weather, as customers burned more oil or tried to stock up on extra fuel. Bad weather has also made it hard for barges to unload their oil cargoes in some East Coast harbors.

A series of arctic air blasts has chilled the eastern half of the country for 10 days, producing early morning temperatures Thursday of minus 28 degrees in Bismarck, N.D.; minus 21 in Minneapolis-St. Paul; minus 16 in Des Moines, Iowa; minus 1 in Albany, N.Y., and 14 in Boston.