Asia Naphtha/Gasoline-Naphtha slips; gasoline at 9-1/2 month high

SINGAPORE: Asia's naphtha crack fell 5 percent on Friday to $105.60 a tonne after a near 16 percent spike in the previous session to a one-year high, while the gasoline crack reached a 9-1/2 month high of $11.82 a barrel.

Gasoline and naphtha have been boosted in part by a fire at ADNOC's Ruwais refinery in the United Arab Emirates which coincided with a fire at Russia's Tuapse oil refinery this week.

"It was a knee-jerk reaction yesterday but people now feel that it was overdone," a Singapore-based trader said in reference to the lower naphtha crack on Friday versus Thursday.

European naphtha shipments to Asia for February arrival were some 40 percent lower when compared to January. Both Russia and the Middle East export naphtha to Asia.

Traders said the situation for gasoline and naphtha supplies was not clear but they said there was talk of sharp production cuts at the Ruwais refinery.

ADNOC, for instance, had offered crude for prompt loading and this could point to a more serious outage at the refinery.

In Russia, the Tuapse oil refinery, owned by Rosneft, will restart a vacuum gasoil unit within 24 hours from Thursday.

Naphtha weekly stocks in independently held storage in the Amsterdam-Rotterdam-Antwerp hub fell nearly 26 percent from a week ago to reach 167,000 tonnes in the week to Jan. 12, data from Dutch consultancy PJK International showed.

TENDERS: India's Bharat Petroleum Corp Ltd (BPCL) has sold 55,000 tonnes of naphtha for Jan. 25-27 loading from Kochi to Chinese trader PetroChina at premiums of about $14.50 a tonne to Middle East quotes on a free-on-board (FOB) basis.

BPCL usually sells cargoes in medium range vessel size of up to 35,000 tonnes.

It had recently sold up to 30,000 tonnes for Jan. 8-10 loading from Mumbai to be co-loaded with up to 35,000 tonnes from Kochi to Japanese trader Petro-Diamond at premium of about $5.