LONDON: Northwest European gasoline refining margins, weighed down by high stockpiles, fell on Friday from an eight-month high which had been fuelled by strong US demand and lower crude oil prices.
Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic are making available to their domestic refiners around 8 million barrels of crude from strategic stocks to tackle the Russian Druzhba pipeline shutdown, industry sources said on Friday.
Traders said that Total's 240,000 barrel per day Leuna refinery in Germany had slashed runs because of the contamination by around 30 percent but exact details could not be immediately confirmed.
German industry Group MWV said on Thursday that Leuna and PCK's 240,000 bpd Schwedt refinery were arranging to receive crude from tankers coming to the Baltic Sea.
It was not immediately clear how the crude would then be transported to the refineries.
Gunvor's 88,000 barrel per day (bpd) Rotterdam oil refinery shut one crude distillation unit (CDU), two industry sources said on Friday.
Gasoline stocks in independent storage in the Amsterdam-Rotterdam-Antwerp (ARA) refining and storage hub rose by 11.7 percent in the week to Thursday, according to data from Dutch consultancy Insights Global, previously PJK International.
Stocks stood at 1.03 million tonnes, the data showed, and exports of the motor fuel were on transatlantic journeys and on their way to West Africa
US gasoline stocks rose by 917,000 barrels last week, Energy Information Administration data showed on Thursday.
That compared with analyst expectations for a 1 million barrel drop in a Reuters poll.
One crude and one vacuum unit at Poland's 330,000 bpd Plock refinery have been shut for planned maintenance until the end of May, a spokeswoman for owner PKN Orlen said on Wednesday.
Industry monitor Genscape on Wednesday said that the 69,500 bpd crude unit and the 51,000 bpd vacuum unit were shut late on Tuesday.
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