Tuesday, June 21, 2016

Price changes for Thursday, June 23, 2016

Hi to all,

Here's what I have for price changes for this week!

*Heating and stove oils show a drop of 6/10ths of a cent....
*Diesel shows a drop of an even penny, and...
*Gasoline shows a drop of 3.5 cents a litre on the way.


Market highlights

Rig count continues to rise
       It may be a painful thing to watch, but the fact that the US drilling rig count was up again last week put some worries back into the markets late last week that US drilling is more resilient to the "Saudi onslaught" of oil that has been dumped into the markets.
      That's the second week in a row that the rig count has been up and probably proves that the US drilling industry itself has learned how to cut some of their costs in order to keep operating.

Return of Alberta crude
      As Alberta crude starts to come back online starting last week, also coming along with it was less of a worry about any implied shortages of oil in the markets. The fires in Alberta's Fort McMurray area took close to 750,000 barrels offline, making some imports to the US Midwest and Oklahoma area a little shy on inventory that helped support prices.

Demand for gasoline slipping?

      While US inventories of gasoline were down again last week, refiner capacity just came over the line of 90%, a bit of a signal to the markets that maybe some refiners are trying to throttle back on gasoline production to help support the price.
      Gasoline and crude oil are both at historically high levels of inventory for this time of the year with gasoline inventories 19 million barrels over the same time period for last year.
I'm thinking that speculators aren't entirely "pleased" with the notion going forward that demand will pick up anytime soon based on that figure.

I'll leave it at that for now!

George Murphy
Twitter @GeorgeMurphyOil

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