Gasoline futures rose a fourth day after Hurricane Katrina shut oil refineries near the Gulf of Mexico, raising prospects pump prices across America will exceed $3 a gallon.

Some refiners and wholesalers are restricting the amount of fuel retailers can buy. Crude oil fell a second day after the government said it would release oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, and the Louisiana Offshore Oil Port, the nation’s biggest import terminal, prepared to unload its first tanker since the storm.

“The release from the SPR has helped lower oil,” a commodity strategist at the Commonwealth Bank of Australia in Sydney, David Thurtell, said. “Requests from other refiners will be coming in thick and fast” as they try to produce gasoline, the price of which has “gone ballistic,” he said.

Gasoline for October delivery rose as much as 7.32 cents, or 3.3%, to $2.3285 a gallon in after-hours electronic trading. It was at $2.3050 at 9:19 a.m. Singapore time. The September contract reached a record $2.92 a gallon on the New York Mercantile Exchange before the contract expired yesterday.

It closed at $2.6145 a gallon, a 5.7% gain.

Crude oil for October delivery fell 34 cents, or 0.5%, to $68.60 a barrel, in after-hours trading. The contract, which reached a record $70.85 on Tuesday, fell 87 cents, or 1.3%, to $68.94 a barrel yesterday. Prices today are 56% higher than a year ago.

Workers at the Louisiana Offshore Oil Port were yesterday preparing to start unloading tankers again.

“We have people on the platform and working to restore communication right now,” a scheduling manager at the port manager New Orleans-based Loop, Mark Bugg, said yesterday. “A tanker may dock this afternoon and possibly offload by this evening.”

The oil port stopped unloading tankers on August 27 as Katrina approached. Port Fourchon in Louisiana, a staging area for workers who staff Gulf oil and natural-gas production platforms, opened yesterday morning.

Placid Refining said it will start receiving a 1 million-barrel oil loan from the strategic reserve next week. The company’s 49,000 barrels-a-day refinery in Port Allen, La., is operating at 70% capacity after the hurricane shut pipelines that supply its crude oil.

The government has received at least three requests from refiners for oil from the reserve, Energy Secretary Bodman said yesterday.

American gasoline stockpiles had their ninth straight decline last week, falling 508,000 barrels to 194.4 million, the U.S. Energy Department said yesterday. Crude-oil inventories declined 1.5 million barrels to 321.4 million, the department reported.

Eight refineries in Louisiana and Mississippi were closed yesterday, halting at least 1.79 million barrels a day of refining capacity. Another three are operating at less than capacity because power or pipeline failures have reduced supplies of crude oil.

“Release of the SPR isn’t going to get the refineries back on line or get the electricity running,” an energy consultant and president of Cameron Hanover, Peter Beutel, said.

Regular-grade gasoline, averaged nationwide, rose 1.5 cents to a record $2.619 a gallon on Tuesday, according to data released by the AAA, the nation’s largest motoring organization. Pump prices are 41% higher than a year ago.