European gasoline margins fall to six-month low

Benchmark northwest European gasoline refining margins declined further on Tuesday to their lowest since late March as exports slowed down and rising Atlantic basin supplies weighed. The cargo market remained quiet, with little new buying interest to go to the US East Coast following the recent rise in inventories there, traders said.
Most arbitrage activity focused on Asia and the Middle East, where prices have been supported by refinery outages. Around 800,000 tonnes of gasoline were booked to ship out of northwest Europe and the Mediterranean to the Middle East and Asia, where refinery outages have tightened supplies in recent weeks, according to traders and shipping data.
The volume of traffic on US highways has stopped growing, and with it gasoline consumption, as rising prices curb driving behaviour. Traffic volumes in July were 0.3 percent lower than a year earlier, after seasonal adjustments, according to the Federal Highway Administration.