Asia's gasoline cracks extend gains

Asia's gasoline cracks extended gains to reach $10.07 a barrel on Thursday, highest since February 27, as a drawdown in US stocks gave the market support, traders said. US gasoline stocks fell 2.8 million barrels, compared with analysts' expectations in a Reuters poll for a 2.0 million-barrel drop.
Similarly, Singapore's onshore light distillates stocks, which comprise mostly gasoline and blending components for petrol, were also down. The inventories fell 6 percent to reach a three-week low of 13.42 million barrels in the week to March 22, official data showed.
Spain has shipped around 64,000 tonnes of gasoline to Singapore, the data showed. It does not usually export gasoline to Singapore. But concerns over China flooding the market with supplies lingered. China exported 1.06 million tonnes of gasoline in February, about 4 percent lower than the record volumes it had exported in June last year, its customs data showed.
More than half of the 1.06 million barrels were shipped to Singapore. In contrast to Singapore and the US, Japan's gasoline weekly stocks were at a four-week high of nearly 11 million barrels in the week to March 18, data from the Petroleum Association of Japan (PAJ) showed. Venezuelan state oil company PDVSA has controlled a small fire that broke out on Wednesday at its 645,000-barrel-per-day Amuay refinery, the company said in a statement.
NAPHTHA SLIPS Asia's naphtha crack slipped 4 percent to a two-week low of $72.28 a tonne, but discounts given on spot cargoes narrowed as supplies were not as abundant as before following a string of spot and term purchases these two weeks, traders said.
South Korea's YNCC bought 50,000 tonnes of naphtha for first-half May arrival at Yeosu at a discount of about 50 cents a tonne to Japan quotes on a cost-and-freight (C&F) basis. It had paid a steeper discount of $3.50 a tonne on March 7 for cargoes delivering in second-half April. Lotte Chemical remained in talks to seal a term with sellers for cargoes delivering from June 2017 to May 2018. Traders were expecting Lotte to ink the deal at a slight discount versus a discount of $3.00 to $3.50 a tonne for YNCC's April 2017 to March 2018 deal done last week as fundamentals have now improved for sellers.