Asia’s naphtha crack was at a five-session high of $60.95 a tonne on Wednesday, held up by lower Brent crude prices. – “Naphtha crack was mainly driven by the downward movements in Brent. August Brent prices are comparatively very low in value now,” said a Singapore-based source.
* NAPHTHA TENDERS: China’s Unipec was looking to buy naphtha for first-half August delivery. – Kuwait Petroleum Corp (KPC) has sold 25,000 tonnes of full-range naphtha earlier this week for June 24-25 loading to Vitol at premiums in the high single-digit levels to Middle East quotes on a free-on-board (FOB) basis. – KPC has an outstanding tender to sell 28,000 tonnes of light naphtha for July 18-19 loading.
* CRACKER NEWS: Japan’s Mitsui Chemicals has shut its 612,000 tonnes per year (tpy) naphtha cracker in Ichihara, Chiba prefecture, on June 20 as planned for a scheduled maintenance. – The cracker will resume operations around Aug. 3. * GASOLINE: Asia’s gasoline crack slipped to a four-session low of $8.86 a barrel but demand from India was seen strong due to planned shutdown of refinery units.
* GASOLINE TENDERS: India’s Bharat Petroleum Corp Ltd was seeking 70,000 tonnes of gasoline for August arrival at Kochi and another optional 35,000 tonnes of the fuel for September arrival at Kochi through a tender to plug a supply gap caused by refinery expansion works.
* STOCK LEVELS: Japan’s gasoline stocks were at a four-week low of nearly 12 million barrels in the week to June 17, down 580,000 barrels from a week ago.
* REFINERY NEWS: Taiwan’s Formosa is to shut a crude until from July 10 for about three to four weeks. – Sinopec Corp’s 250,000 bpd Tianjin refinery aims to raise fuel quality and has added a 2.6 million tpy residue fuel hydrotreating unit, a 2.8 million-tpy catalytic cracking unit and a 1.2 million-tpy desulfurising unit for gasoline.
– Upgrade is expected to be completed in 2020 and that would raise its gasoline yield by 12 percent. *
SINGAPORE CASH DEALS: Five deals, of which four were on gasoline and one on naphtha.
LIGHT DISTILLATES CASH ($/T) ASIA CLOSE Change % Change Prev Close
RIC OSN Naphtha CFR Japan M1 404.00 -7.00 -1.70 411.00
OSN Naphtha CFR Japan M2 402.00 -7.00 -1.71 409.00
OSN Naphtha Diff 2.00 0.00 0.00 2.00
Naphtha Netback FOB Sing 43.41 -0.78 -1.77 44.19
Naphtha Diff FOB Sing 0.10 0.05 100.00 0.05
Naphtha-Brent Crack 60.95 3.20 5.54 57.75
Gasoline 97 57.85 -1.46 -2.46 59.31
Gasoline 95 56.80 -1.30 -2.24 58.10
Gasoline 92 54.60 -1.40 -2.50 56.00
Gasoline crack 8.86 -0.04 -0.45 8.90
Source: Reuters (Reporting by Seng Li Peng; Editing by Sunil Nair)