Benchmark northwest European gasoline refining margins ended the week lower but export activity to West Africa capped losses. Several new tankers were booked in recent days to load gasoline in Europe to go to the West African market, where Nigeria has been driving up demand, shipping reports show. Industry monitor Genscape detected increased activity on a gasoline-making FCC and merox unit at Repsol's 220,000 bpd Petronor refinery in Spain on Friday after a brief outage the previous day.
Gasoline stocks independently held in the Amsterdam-Rotterdam-Antwerp (ARA) refining and storage hub fell to 944,000 tonnes in the week to Thursday, according to data from Dutch consultancy PJK International. Total main product stocks in key areas (US, ARA independent storage, Singapore and Japan) built by 1.5 million barrels in the most recent available data, consultants FGE Energy said. Total main product stocks are now 10.3 million barrels higher year on year, with gasoline/naphtha 21 million barrels higher on the year, FGE said. European refiners processed 1.4 percent less crude in October than a year earlier at a rate of 10.408 million barrels per day (bpd), data from Euroilstock showed on Friday. European crude oil and oil product stocks were up 0.3 percent month on month and down 0.1 percent from a year earlier.