Front-month Asia naphtha crack for first-half November rose for the second day to reach a 3-1/2-week high of $101.20 a tonne on Thursday, on expectations that demand would rise. Buyers were expected to start purchasing second-half November cargoes now that an annual oil conference in Singapore has ended. Due to the conference, participants were mostly away from the market for the first three days of the week. The exception was one tender seen from Taiwan's CPC looking to buy cargoes for November delivery.
India's HPCL has sold up to 24,000 tonnes of naphtha, for Oct. 12-16 loading from Mumbai, to Trafigura at a premium of about $1.50 a tonne to its own price formula on a free-on-board (FOB) basis. It had previously sold up to 20,000 tonnes for Aug. 17-22 loading from the same port to BP at a premium of $11. It had also sold for September but the details of that sale were unclear.
Kuwait has sold a total of 75,000 tonnes of full-range naphtha this week - a 50,000-tonne cargo for end October loading and a 25,000-tonne cargo for early October loading. The end October cargo was sold at low teens a tonne to Middle East quotes on a FOB basis to an Asian trader, while the smaller parcel was sold to BP at a premium of about $5 a tonne. With these, Kuwait's total sales for October shipment have hit 170,000 tonnes.
Asia's gasoline crack recovered to a three-session high of $7.51 a barrel, snapping four straight sessions of losses. Demand has led to Singapore light distillates stocks falling nearly 5 percent or 590,000 barrels to reach a two-week low of 11.84 million barrels in the week to Sept. 26, official data showed. US gasoline stocks in contrast rose by 1.5 million barrels last week, the Energy Information Administration (EIA) said on Wednesday.
This was higher than analyst expectations in a Reuters poll for a 800,000-barrel gain. Japan's JXTG Nippon Oil & Energy Corp will shut a 90,200 barrels-per-day (bpd) No. 2 crude distillation unit (CDU) at its Mizushima-B plant from early October to late November for scheduled maintenance.
Comments
Comments are closed.