SINGAPORE: Asia's naphtha crack fell to a one-month low of $79.05 a tonne on Thursday while gasoline was hit harder by strong oil prices and oversupply, with its crack value diving to a more-than-1-1/2 year low of $6.74 a barrel.
- Refinery maintenance season in North Asia has failed to lift sentiment, traders said.
- Some of China's maintenance include PetroChina's 200,000 barrels-per-day (bpd) Sichuan refinery which had begun a 60-day maintenance on April 8, its first major overhaul since it started operations four years ago.
- Sinopec Corp, on the other hand, will shut its entire 460,000 bpd refinery and a 1.1 million tonnes-per-year ethylene complex in Zhejiang for a 40-day maintenance starting from May 1.
- "If refiners can switch further to distillates then the market is definitely telling them to do so - spot mogas/ULSD (gasoline/ultra-low sulphur diesel) spreads in all major regions are in negative territory on a barrel basis and several dollars per barrel below both this time last year and the seasonal average," said a note by JBC Energy.
* INVENTORIES: Singapore's onshore light distillates stocks, which comprise mostly gasoline and blending components for petrol, fell 4.8 percent or 689,000 barrels to a six-week low of 13.75 million barrels in the week to April 11, official data showed.
- US gasoline stocks rose last week by 458,000 barrels, data from the US Energy Information Administration showed, and this went against analysts' expectations in a Reuters poll for a 1.4 million-barrel drop.
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