U.S. Oil Imports Up 4.1% in August : Energy: Both supplies and prices rose over year-ago levels in the wake of Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait.

U.S. petroleum imports rose 4.1% in August compared to a year ago, a leading industry group said today, in the first comprehensive look at the nation’s oil supplies for the month in which Iraq invaded Kuwait.

The invasion on Aug. 2 threw world oil markets into chaos, and fears of supply shortages sent crude prices skyrocketing.

The American Petroleum Institute said in its monthly report that imports of crude oil and petroleum products rose to 8.88 million barrels per day in August, compared to 8.53 million barrels a day in August, 1989.

The August imports were down slightly from July.

Analysts had said it would take more than a month for the trade sanctions against Iraq to start having a real impact on the nation’s energy supplies.

The nation’s stockpile of crude oil and petroleum products was up 2.9% from the previous August, at 1.1 billion barrels at the end of the month, API said. That was about the same as July.

But by the end of August, crude prices had risen by between 70% and more than 100% above their levels in mid June, API said.

Oil prices tumbled about $1 per barrel today in reaction to a separate API report that indicated the United States has a bigger supply of gasoline than futures traders had thought.

“There was a large, unexpected build in gasoline stocks,” said Ann-Louise Hittle, a senior oil analyst with Shearson Lehman Brothers Inc.

The weekly report, issued Tuesday night, showed that gasoline stocks were up to 217 million barrels last week from 211.1 million barrels a week earlier.

Those numbers pushed light sweet crude down $1.01 to $32.40 per barrel for October delivery in late morning trading on the New York Mercantile Exchange.

Other crude contracts were also down as speculators sold futures in response to the API report.