July 15 (Bloomberg) -- Reliance Industries Ltd., the Mumbai-based refiner seeking to compete overseas, has sent its first shipment of gasoline in two years to the U.S. from its new plant, a shipbroker said.

Hess Corp. chartered the tanker King Douglas to transport gasoline to New York starting June 28, Singapore-based Millennium Chartering Pte., a ship brokerage, reported last month. Lorrie Hecker, a spokeswoman for Hess, and Manoj Warrier, a Reliance spokesman, declined to comment.

The cargo, signaling a new source of global supply, will arrive as U.S. gasoline inventories are climbing and prices are falling. Stockpiles of gasoline rose 1.44 million barrels last week, or 0.7 percent, to 214.6 million, the highest since April 17, the U.S. Energy Department said today. Analysts surveyed by Bloomberg News had expected an increase of 875,000 barrels.

“The growing amount of global refinery capacity is expected to pressure refining margins both in the United States and around the world,” said Andy Lipow, president of Lipow Oil Associates LLC in Houston. The “increased production of gasoline and distillate is more than adequate to satisfy near term oil demand.”

Mike Reardon, a Houston-based vice president at freight- derivatives broker Imarex ASA, said in an interview that shipbrokers dealing in refined products expect the vessel to arrive this month. Reliance will be supplying fuel to Hess from a new 580,000-barrel-a-day plant, Reardon said.

Reliance is currently selling fuel through Hess, said a company official yesterday, who spoke on condition of anonymity. Reliance has leased storage space from Hess, he said, without giving capacity details.

The ship, which can carry as much as 626,000 barrels of gasoline, is due to arrive in New York July 18, according to Bloomberg vessel-tracking data.

Reliance Complex

The new refinery, which began operating in December, is in the Gujarat province in western India. It’s located next to an older plant that can process 660,000 barrels a day. Together, they make up the largest refining complex in the world, according to Reliance.

Reliance is selling fuels overseas because it is unable to compete with India’s state-run refiners, which sell gasoline and diesel below cost. India’s government subsidizes state refineries with oil bonds to partly offset their revenue losses, while non-state refiners including Reliance and Essar Oil Ltd. do not get any such benefit.

Rising Capacity

Global crude distillation capacity is forecast to increase by 7.6 million barrels a day between 2008 and 2014, the International Energy Agency said June 29 in its Medium-Term Oil Market Report. The rise is more than twice the 3.2 million barrels of projected oil demand growth.

“There’s all these export refineries being built in India and China,” Bjorn Moller, chief executive officer of Teekay Corp., the world’s largest shipowner, said in a June 23 interview. “They have surplus product, it gets shipped to the Atlantic. You’re seeing crude oil shipped to Asia, refined, and shipped back to the Atlantic.”

Global refining margins dropped to an average of $4.98 a barrel in the second quarter of this year compared with $8.25 a year earlier, according to BP Plc data. Margins started this quarter averaging $2.17 a barrel, the data show.

Asian refinery capacity, led by India and China, has grown by about 1.1 million barrels per day since the beginning of 2008, according to Teekay. India and China have a combined 10.6 million barrels a day of refining capacity, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

To contact the reporter on this story: Todd Zeranski in New York at tzeranski@bloomberg.netAaron Clark in New York at aclark27@bloomberg.net

Last Updated: July 15, 2009 12:21 EDT