LONDON: Northwest European gasoline refining margins ticked up on Thursday amid a big outage at a US refinery.
Gasoline stocks in independent storage in the Amsterdam-Rotterdam-Antwerp (ARA) refining and storage hub rose by 6% in the week to Thursday, data from Dutch consultancy Insights Global showed.
The rise was prompted by traders anticipating increased demand from the US east coast following a fire at a major refinery in Philadelphia, Lars van Wageningen of Insights Global said.
Philadelphia Energy Solutions (PES) will seek to permanently shut its oil refinery in the city after a massive fire caused substantial damage to the complex.
PES dramatically scaled back a large maintenance project in January in the same section of the refinery complex where a massive explosion occurred last week, according to three sources familiar with the plant's operations.
PES will keep the Girard Point section of its Philadelphia refinery complex closed for "weeks, if not months" after the fire, according to two sources.
The refinery supplies around 55,000 bpd of gasoline to the New York region and the outage was expected to lead to a sharp rise in imports.
Around 11 tankers have been booked out of Europe on the transatlantic route since the fire, according to brokers, traders and shipping data.
The relatively mute response was due to a sharp rise in freight rates on the arbitrage route, which jumped from around 125 points on the world scale last week to 170 points this week, according to traders and shipping data.
US gasoline stocks fell last week by 996,000 barrels, compared with analysts' expectations in a Reuters poll for a 288,000-barrel gain, according to EIA data.
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