Asia gasoline crack jumps to over 1-yr high on hopes of Indonesian demand

SINGAPORE: Asia’s gasoline crack climbed to a more than one-year high on Tuesday, boosted by expectations of increased imports of the motor fuel from Indonesia after its Balongan refinery was shut due to a fire in the facility’s storage area.

Indonesian state oil firm Pertamina, however, said it expects operations at the 125,000 barrel per day facility to resume in a matter of days and there was no plan to import fuel yet. “At the moment we’re still optimising national stock,” said Putut Andriatno, corporate secretary of Pertamina’s commercial and trading unit.

Asia’s gasoline market, which has been boosted by recovering regional demand for the fuel and falling inventories, remained bullish.

The gasoline crack climbed to $6.88 a barrel on Tuesday, up from $6.19 on Monday and its highest since March 10, 2020.

It has risen steadily over the past three sessions, up from $5.81 a barrel at the start of the month and $3.87 a barrel at the start of February.

Light distillate inventories in the Singapore hub fell 6% to an eight-week low of 14.647 million barrels in the week to March 24.

By contrast, Asia’s naphtha crack fell on Tuesday as the Suez Canal reopened to traffic and eased concerns of supply disruptions to Asia.

The naphtha crack dropped to a near two-week low of $96.50 a tonne on Tuesday, down from $97.55 in the previous session and a near two-week high of $108.90 per tonne on Friday.

Similarly, the front-month naphtha arbitrage spread, the price difference between naphtha cargoes in Asia and Northwest Europe, slipped 50 cents from the previous session to $14.75 a tonne on Tuesday, Refinitiv data in Eikon showed.

Concerns of supply disruptions pushed the arbitrage spread to a more than a four-month high of $20 a tonne on Friday, Refinitiv data in Eikon showed.

Shipping was on the move again late on Monday in Egypt’s Suez Canal after tugs refloated a giant container ship that had been blocking the channel for almost a week, causing a huge build-up of vessels around the waterway.

Pertamina said on Tuesday it was still trying to fully extinguish a fire that broke out at its Balongan refinery a day before, injuring six people and prompting the evacuation of hundreds of nearby residents.

Pertamina expects operations to be restored in four to five days as the damage was limited to the storage area of the West Java refinery and did not affect its oil processing area, company officials said on Monday.

Pertamina chief executive Nicke Widyawati said in a statement late on Monday that only 7% of the 1.35 million kilolitres (KL) of storage capacity at Balongan was affected by the fire.