Asia's benchmark gasoline margin narrowed its unusual discount to Brent crude on Thursday but concerns of a persistent supply glut continued to weigh on market sentiment with excess supplies struggling to find an outlet, trade sources said.
The benchmark Singapore 92 RON gasoline crack against Brent crude edged 52 cents a barrel higher to a discount of $1.03 a barrel on Thursday.
With few signs of easing output from across the region, the gasoline margin hit minus $1.55 a barrel on Wednesday, its lowest level since November 2011.
This came as Singapore inventories of light distillates snapped three weeks of inventory builds after falling to two-week low of 13.875 million barrels in the week to Dec. 5, data from Enterprise Singapore showed.
Singapore inventories of light distillates were down by 3.5 percent, or 500,000 barrels from the near four-month high of 14.375 million barrels in the week before.
However, this week's inventories of light distillates, which include gasoline, reformate and naphtha, were 8 percent lower than a year earlier.
Singapore light distillate inventories averaged 13.331 million barrels per week so far this year, compared to the 2017 average of 12.736 million barrels.
Taiwan's CPC is offering 9,000 tonnes of 100 RON reformate loading from Kaohsiung in January in a tender closing on Dec. 10 with two days validity.
India's HPCL is offering 25,000 tonnes of naphtha with a 65 percent minimum paraffin content loading from Vizag over Dec. 8-10 in a tender closing on Dec. 6 with same day validity.
India's IOC sold 35,000 tonnes of naphtha loading from Chennai over Dec. 23-25 to BP at a premium of about $10 per tonne to the average of Platts and Argus Arab Gulf naphtha quotes on an FOB basis.
The EIA will release its data on Thursday at 11 a.m EST, delayed by a day after the White House designated Dec. 5 as the National Day of Mourning for former President George H.W. Bush, who died on Friday at age 94.
Venezuela this month plans to import over 300,000 barrels per day (bpd) of refined products to ease domestic fuel shortages caused by hobbled refineries and need to prioritize exports, according to internal documents seen by Reuters.