Liam Denning, Columnist

Valero's Unflattering Imitation of Big Oil

It's jacking up payouts to carry investors through a margin slump.

July 26, 2016 at 5:14 PM UTC

Liam Denning is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering energy. A former banker, he edited the Wall Street Journal’s Heard on the Street column and wrote the Financial Times’s Lex column.

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Valero Energy is doing a pretty good impression of an oil major. Which should make oil majors nervous.

Valero doesn't produce oil, it just refines and markets it. Traditionally, the business of processing oil has been the poor relation to the upstream side of the industry. But with the glut in gasoline and diesel weighing on the outlook for crude oil, downstream is in the spotlight for all the wrong reasons.