IEA denies its chief predicted $45 oil will last

VIENNA (Reuters) - The International Energy Agency (IEA) denied on Tuesday that its chief, Fatih Birol, said in a newspaper interview that he expected the price of crude oil to stay around $45 a barrel "for a long time", and the paper removed the quote from its online edition.

Quoting the Reuters translation of a sentence published in Austrian daily Kurier on Tuesday, IEA spokesman Greg Frost said: "He categorically denies having said 'Forty five dollars a barrel will remain the price for a long time.'"

The sentence was removed from the version of the article published on Kurier's website after the IEA denied Birol had said it, according to both Frost and the Kurier journalist who interviewed Birol.

Elsewhere in the article, when asked whether prices would ever exceed $100 a barrel again, Birol was quoted as saying: "I can only say that the oil price will remain low for some quarters."

Benchmark Brent crude futures were up 64 cents at $47.98 a barrel at 1537 GMT, while WTI crude futures were 54 cents higher at $44.97 per barrel.

"Cheap oil is causing oil companies big problems," Birol said in the interview. "This year, they have reduced their investments by a fifth. Never in the history of these companies has there been an annual reduction as strong as this year."

(Reporting by Francois Murphy; Editing by Susan Fenton)