Reversal Thursday Is In Effect To Start Thursday’s Trading

Reversal Thursday is in effect to start Thursday’s trading, pushing prices modestly lower after a strong 3 day rally for both energy and equity markets. While the recovery rally this week puts the threat of a bear market on hold, refined products still need to add another 5-7 cents in order to break chart resistance and put an end to the 7 week slide. 

While yesterday’s DOE report was largely shrugged off, it’s clear that near term fundamentals probably aren’t the reason for prices bouncing 25 cents this week, and may provide headwinds to future rally attempts.   The holiday demand hangover hit hard, and helped drive big increases in gasoline and diesel inventories across the country. After a 2nd straight healthy increase in inventories, US gasoline supplies look like they’ve officially made the turn higher for winter, and should continue building for the next 8-10 weeks before beginning the spring drawdown.    

Refinery runs reached a 3 month high as refiners continue to come out of a busy fall turnaround season, and deal with a rash of unplanned upsets all over the country. While production is increasing, it’s still not back to where it was before Hurricane Ida hit the Gulf Coast in August. PADD 2 runs saw the bulk of the increase, which should help to alleviate the extreme product tightness that followed most Ohio refineries being knocked offline in the past month. 

Ethanol production jumped last week as producers race to take advantage of the highest prices in a decade, before the inevitable collapse with forward values trading more than $1 below prompt barrels. RIN values stabilized yesterday after Tuesday’s whipsaw action, trading between $1.02-$1.10 for D6 ethanol RINs on the day.

As the natural gas chess match between the US & Russia ramps up, the EIA is highlighting that new export facilities along the Gulf Coast will create the world’s largest LNG export capacity by the end of next year.   Will that be enough to prevent another energy supply crunch in Europe if Russia turns off the taps in retaliation for sanctions? It’s hard to see how they could any time soon, when Russia is currently providing nearly 30% of European gas supplies, while the US accounts for only 3% and most US exports are heading to Asia.

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