Crude oil prices slid to less than $99 per barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange Tuesday, the last trading day of the year. Most equity markets were closed in Europe, the CAC, IBEX and FTSE 100 indexes being the exceptions. The rest were shuttered for the New Year’s Eve holiday. Light, sweet crude on the NYMEX listing shed 60 cents to $98.69 per barrel. Reformulated gasoline blendstock for January gave up 0.19 cents to $2.7858 a gallon. January heating oil dropped 4.69 cents to $3.0772 a gallon while natural gas lost 18 cents to $4.25 per million British thermal units. The national average price of unleaded regular gasoline rose at the pump, climbing to $3.318 a gallon from Monday’s $3.312, the AAA Daily Fuel Gauge Report said. The top Odd News stories of 2013 Shark photobomb? Family photo captures possible shark encounter […]