MOSCOW (MRC) -- Asian refining margins for 10 ppm gasoil climbed for a fourth consecutive session on Friday, posting a second straight weekly gain, riding on tighter supplies amid lower Chinese exports in the spot market and steady arbitrage shipments to the West, said Hydrocarbonprocessing.
Refining margins or cracks for 10 ppm gasoil jumped to USD11.24 per barrel over Dubai crude during Asian trading hours, a fresh high since March-end last year. They were at $10.85 per barrel a day earlier. Cracks for the benchmark gasoil grade in Singapore have risen 7% this week, Refinitiv Eikon data showed. Cash premiums for gasoil with 10 ppm sulphur content dipped 3 cents to 45 cents per barrel to Singapore quotes on Friday, while cash differentials for jet fuel were at a premium of 11 cents per barrel to Singapore quotes, up from 4 cents per barrel on Thursday. Jet fuel cracks surged to USD9.16 per barrel over Dubai crude during Asian trading hours, the strongest since March 2020. The cracks were at USD8.57 per barrel in the previous session.
Gasoil stocks held independently in the Amsterdam-Rotterdam-Antwerp (ARA) refining and storage hub dropped 5.7% to about 2 million tonnes in the week ended Sept. 23, according to Dutch consultancy Insights Global. - ARA jet fuel inventories fell 14.7% this week to 879,000 tonnes.
State major PetroChina and private refiner Hengli Petrochemical on Friday won four cargoes totalling about 4.43 million barrels, or 60% of the total oil offered in China's first state reserves auction, industry sources said. - Completed in less than an hour, PetroChina's Dalian refinery took one cargo each of Qatar Marine and U.K. Forties crude at USD65 a barrel, said several sources with direct knowledge of the matter. Hengli bought an Oman cargo at USD65 a barrel and Abu Dhabi's Upper Zakum crude at USD70.50 a barrel, they said.
As per MRC, China's oil consumption is likely to peak around 2026 at about 16 million barrels per day and that of natural gas by around 2040. Siinopec's oil peak forecast echoes a prediction by consultancy Rystad Energy in April that cited rapid adoption of electric vehicles as the main cause for global oil demand to peak over the next five years.
As MRC wrote previously, in August 2021, China Petroleum and Chemical Corp, also known as Sinopec, the world's petrochemical major, launched the first phase of the Gulei refining complex in Zhangzhou city in China’s southeastern Fujian province. The refining complex, a 50:50 joint venture between Sinopec’s Fujian Petrochemical Company Ltd and Taiwan Xuteng Investment Company Ltd, invested 27.8 billion yuan (USD4.28 billion) in the first phase. That will result in an 800,000 tonnes per annum ethylene plant, a 600,000 tonnes per annum styrene unit and seven other downstream petrochemical units, Sinopec said.
Ethylene and propylene are the main feedstocks for the production of polyethylene (PE) and polypropylene (PP), respectively.
According to MRC's ScanPlast report, Russia's estimated PE consumption totalled 1,396,960 tonnes in January-July 2021, up by 7% year on year. Shipments of all grades of ethylene polymers increased. At the same time, PP shipments to the Russian market were 841,990 tonnes in the first seven months of 2021, up by 29% year on year. Supply of propylene homopolymers (homopolymer PP) and block-copolymers of propylene (PP block copolymers) increased, whereas supply of statistical copolymers of propylene (PP random copolymers) subsided.
MRC