Oil prices retreated this morning despite recent sharp gains, although supply worries linked to Iran continue to support prices.
Light, sweet crude for June delivery fell 48 cents to $74.69 a barrel in Asian electronic trading on the New York Mercantile Exchange.
The contract on Friday rose $1.48 to settle at a record $75.17 a barrel, after peaking at an all-time trading high of $75.35.
"The oil market is now down because most people are taking profits after seeing a sharp increase last week," said Tetsu Emori, chief commodities strategist at Mitsui Bussan Futures in Tokyo.
He added that market participants continued to be worried about how international pressure on Iran, Opec's second-ranked oil producer, will affect its crude output.
Rebel disruptions of oil production in Nigeria, the fifth-biggest source of US oil imports, also pose a risk to supply.
Earlier this month, Iran announced for the first time that it had enriched uranium, a step toward large-scale production of nuclear fuel that can be used either in atomic weapons or in nuclear reactors for civilian electricity generation.
The UN Security Council's deadline for Iran to cease uranium enrichment is not binding, but the United States and Britain said Iran must comply or the two countries would seek a resolution to make the demand compulsory, which would raise the possibility of sanctions.
But in a message meant to reassure a jittery oil market, Iran's oil minister Kazem Vaziri Hamaneh said Sunday Tehran would not use oil as a political weapon.
"As we didn't stop our exports during the eight-year war with Iraq, why would we now," he said at the International Energy Forum gathering in Qatar.
The Opec president predicted yesterday that oil prices would fall from their current high of just over $75 a barrel to stabilise in the "upper fifties to lower sixties" as political tensions ease.