Price changes for Thursday, September 3rd, 2020

 

Hi to all,

 

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

 

*Heating, stove oil and Gasoline all to drop by 9/10ths of a cent a litre, and...

*Diesel shows a drop of an even penny a litre.

 

Market highlights

 

Hurricane Laura damage

Damage to refinery infrastructure was said to be lighter than expected as Hurricane Laura caused short term outages to electrical infrastructure more so than refinery damage. The damage in the immediate area to electrical infrastructure is described as “catastrophic”.

 

Refineries were only temporarily offline due to the lack of electricity that was seen as being easily prepared as over 13,000 electrical workers were on the job the day after the storm hit.

 

A predicted storm surge of nine feet was much less than the twenty feet that was predicted to hit major refining areas along the coast between Texas and Louisiana. Only 225,000 barrels of refining infrastructure is left to come back online in the Port Charles area as of release time.

 

Offshore oil and gas production is back to 181 different platforms out of 310 that were shut down before Laura hit the area.

 

US EIA inventories

The latest report from the Energy Information Administration continues to show slight drawdowns in stocks, this week showing a drop of 4.7 million barrels, while gasoline supplies dropped 4.6 million barrels. US crude supplies are 15 percent higher than the running five year average, so there’s plenty on hand.

    

Distillates increased by 1.4 million barrels on 82 percent refinery capacity.

 

Interestingly, gasoline supplied to the markets totalled 9.1 million barrels against 9.9 million barrels a day for the same timeframe last year.

 

US domestic production was recorded at 10.8 million barrels, an increase of 100,000 barrels from the previous week.

 

Canadian dollar up again

The Canadian dollar continues to make some headway against the US greenback, gaining two cents against the greenback since the first week of August, saving consumers from rising spot prices that have increased with oil prices this week.

 

That’s it for this week!

 

Regards,

 

George Murphy

Twitter @GeorgeMurphyOil