Asia’s middle distillates markets were heavily discussed throughout the week, though price declines were mostly evident amid bearish outlooks until August and slightly thinner paper market activity.
Activity was particularly affected on Friday by a cyber outage online, with some traders unable to execute trades in the late afternoon session.
On a whole this week, however, deals for physical cargoes in the open window were happening in every other trading session as Trafigura snapped up a total of 850,000 barrels of 10ppm sulphur cargoes and Vitol bought 300,000 barrels of jet fuel.
While the east-west arbitrage was seemingly uneconomical for traders to send cargoes from Asia to northwest Europe, at least one Suezmax is still scheduled to ship nearly 100,000 metric tons of diesel from northeast Asia to the ARA region, sources said.
The freight costs were probably lower because it is considered a backhaul cargo, one source added.
Refining margins closed the trading session at the lowest for the week and at more than a one-month low of nearly $15.50 a barrel – a reflection of poor demand-supply fundamentals.
Spot market discounts were little changed as both buyers and sellers were present at close to discounts of 20 cents a barrel, with the market closing at a discount of 22 cents a barrel.
On the jet fuel front, the east-west arbitrage was mostly uneconomical for sellers to engage in activity on this trade flow so activity stayed regional.
So far, some prompt demand from Japan has been propping up markets – though spot activity remained in discounts for August shipment cargoes.
Regrade was mostly hovering at discounts of slightly more than $1 a barrel through the week.
SINGAPORE CASH DEALS
– No gasoil deal, one jet fuel deal.
INVENTORIES
– Gasoil inventories in the Amsterdam-Rotterdam-Antwerp (ARA) refining and storage hub stood at 2.08 million tons, falling 3.5% on the previous week, despite weak demand inland, as imports slowed.
REFINERY NEWS
– Calcasieu Refining Company has shut down operations at its Lake Charles refinery after a chemical overflow caused heavy flaring, according to a local media report on Thursday.
– Exxon Mobil’s 251,800-barrel-per-day refinery in Joliet, Illinois, lost power during a tornado earlier this week and was still without power as of Thursday, a company spokesperson confirmed.
NEWS
– State-run Sinochem Group has shut in two of its three east China oil refineries for an indefinite period of maintenance, as high crude oil costs and weak fuel demand hurt margins, according to trading sources and local consultancies.
– Two large oil tankers were on fire on Friday in waters near Singapore, the world’s biggest refuelling port, with two crew members airlifted to hospital and others rescued from liferafts, authorities said.
– Indonesia’s oil lifting in January to June was 576,000 barrels per day (bpd) and gas lifting was 5,301 million standard cubic feet per day (mmscfd), Dwi Soetjipto, chairman of upstream regulator SKK Migas, said on Friday.
Source: Reuters (Reporting by Trixie Yap; Editing by Devika Syamnath)