US Weekly Oil Summary: Whiting Refinery Restart Could Take Two More Weeks

BP’s 435k b/d Whiting Refinery in India may need up to two more weeks to restore normal production as it deals with issues during the restart, Bloomberg said.

• EIA Weekly US Petroleum Summary - w/w change week ending Mar 01: Crude stocks +1,367 vs Exp +1,720, Gasoline stocks -4,460 vs Exp -1,060, Implied mogas demand +546, Distillate stocks – 4,131 vs Exp -332, Implied dist demand +538
• The US DOE announced a solicitation to purchase around 3mn barrels of oil for the SPR in September.
• US oil producer Hess said March 7 that it was reviewing the timeline for closing its merger with Chevron.
• Marathon Petroleum’s 593kbpd Galveston Bay, Texas, refinery completed a planned multiunit maintenance on 6 March, sources told Reuters.
• USD: Despite some volatile swings for the greenback following the US employment report on Friday, the USD index is broadly consolidating an impressive 1.10% decline this week. The index has been led lower by an impressive 2% USDJPY selloff as BOJ normalisation speculation builds
• The Federal Reserve is likely to begin cutting interest rates "at some point this year" but not until it becomes more confident that inflation will keep falling, Fed Chair Jerome Powell said Wednesday.
• Initial jobless claims were almost fully in line for no change on the week, at a seasonally adjusted 217k (cons 216k).
• S&P Global US Services PMI final was higher than expected (52.3 vs. 51.4 est), Composite final PMI final (52.5 vs. 51.4 est). ISM Services Index was lower than expected (52.6 vs. 53.0 est)
• The unemployment rate surprisingly increased two tenths from 3.66% to 3.86% (cons 3.7)