WASHINGTON — Worried that high energy costs could spread inflation throughout the economy, Federal Reserve policymakers this month decided they should keep pushing interest rates higher.

Minutes of the Fed's closed-door meeting on Nov. 1, released yesterday, underscored that policymakers were more concerned about the prospects of resurgent inflation than a serious economic slowdown after three deadly hurricanes.

Even though energy prices, which surged to record highs after Hurricane Katrina struck in late August, had moderated by then, "risks to the outlook for underlying inflation remained a key concern," according to the minutes. "There was a risk that the large cumulative rise in energy and petroleum product prices through the summer would be transmitted to core consumer prices."

Core prices, which exclude energy and food, are closely monitored by the Federal Reserve to get a sense of how a wide variety of prices for goods and services are behaving.

"A number of firms had been reporting a greater ability to pass through increases in energy and other costs to customers, though evidently more so to other businesses than to consumers," the minutes said.

To fend off inflation, the Fed at the November meeting raised its key short-term rate — the federal funds rate — by a quarter percentage point to 4 percent, the highest in more than four years. It marked the 12th increase of that size since the Fed began to tighten credit in June 2004.

The federal funds rate, the interest that banks charge each other on overnight loans, influences other interest rates, including banks' prime lending rate.

According to the minutes, policymakers felt fairly confident that the economy was weathering "the temporary disruptions associated with the hurricanes," the Fed document said.

The minutes said that all Fed policymakers believed it was important to keep raising rates "in order to check upside risks to inflation."

But "some members cautioned that risks of going too far with the tightening process could also eventually emerge."