Gasoline Cracks Hold Gains With Bayway FCC Halt Until 4 July

US gasoline crack spreads are holding within a 1.5$/bbl range in the last couple of days after rallying mid last week following news of the outage at the Phillips 66 Bayway refinery 145kbpd FCC.

• The company was unable to patch the hot spot in a crude feedstock line to the FCC reactor and now expect the sole FCC to remain shut at least until 4 July to complete the emergency repairs. The FCC shutdown could trigger a slowdown of other units of the refinery.
• Recent higher import flows to the US could help to cover some of the outage although low inventory levels were already supporting prices before the outage. The US New York region has bought a record 506kbpd of gasoline this month compared to 191kbpd in April according to Bloomberg based on Kpler data going back to 2017.
• EIA data last week suggested the four week average gasoline demand was holding steady at the start of the summer driving season but weekly demand fell 2.3% from the prior week and was 4.2% below the four week moving average according to GasBuddy data yesterday.
  • US 321 crack up 0.3$/bbl at 35.8$/bbl
  • US gasoline crack up 0.3$/bbl at 39.02$/bbl
  • US ULSD crack up 0.4$/bbl at 29.36$/bbl
  • EU Gasoline-Brent down -0.1$/bbl at 21.94$/bbl
  • EU Gasoil-Brent up 0.2$/bbl at 17.21$/bbl