Tuesday, August 11, 2020

Price changes for Thursday, August 13th, 2020

 

Hi to all,

 

Here’s what I have for this week’s price changes: 

*Heating and stove oil to increase by 2/10ths of a cent a litre.

*Diesel fuel shows no changes, and...

*Gasoline shows an increase of just 4/10ths of a cent a litre.

 

Market highlights

Companies buying back oil?

You heard it right.

    During the April storage crisis when prices plunged for West Texas Intermediate, oil companies rented space from the United States strategic reserve. At the time, the companies were successful in getting oil into storage to the tune of 23 million barrels into the Louisiana and Texas old salt mines that were long used for storage in the strategic reserve.

     They had space rented there on the condition they would have it removed again by March 2021.

      Yesterday, it was confirmed by CNBC that seven companies have begun to remove the oil and place it back into regular inventory. The start of the removal process has seen about 2.2 million barrels removed and placed into regular inventory, offsetting some drawdown of stocks that we have seen the past couple of weeks.

       It still leaves a problem of that 20 million barrels that could sway prices. 

US dollar lower spurs oil

Anytime you see a slippage in the US dollar, it’s not unusual to see an increase in oil prices, or any other commodity.

     It has been one of those weeks!...

     Gold climbed well above $2000 a ounce on rising unemployment levels in the US as did oil, but retreated somewhat as some sentiment over growing US employment data as well as rising Covid-19 cases saw gold skyrocket.

     Oil pared any further increases as a result of flattening summer demand. 

US inventory data

The latest Energy Information Administration data is out.

     US crude inventories were down by 7.4 million barrels, while gasoline inventories were up a modest 420,000 barrels on the week.

     Distillate inventories were also up by 1.6 million barrels on 79.6 percent refiner capacity.

     US domestic production was steady at 11 million barrels a day.

     In the meantime, the Baker Hughes rig count was down another four rigs to 247, while 983 were working the same timeframe last year.

 

That’s it for this week!

 

Regards,

 

George Murphy

Twitter @GeorgeMurphyOil  

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