California Gasoline Falls After Exxon Plant Recovers From Upset
California-blend gasoline weakened the most in five days on speculation that the switch to winter- blend fuel will boost supply in the market and after Exxon Mobil Corp. (XOM)’s Torrance refinery recovered from an equipment failure.
Carbob in Los Angeles dropped 9.5 cents to a premium of 26 cents a gallon above gasoline futures traded on the New York Mercantile Exchange at 2:03 p.m. East Coast time, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Prompt delivery fell 11.64 cents to $3.0782 a gallon.
“California refineries will start their switching over from summer to winter blend gasoline,” said Bob van der Valk, an independent fuel pricing analyst in Terry, Montana. “Additional gasoline production will show up on the market as early as Sept. 15.”
Exxon’s 150,000-barrel-a-day Torrance refinery, south of Los Angeles, was operating normally after an equipment failure earlier today. No units were shut as a result of the incident, Barbara Burgett, a spokeswoman at the refinery, said in a telephone interview.
London-based BP Plc was said to be planning maintenance at its 266,000-barrel-a-day Carson refinery in southern California that may result in flaring from tomorrow to Sept. 19. The work isn’t related to an equipment breakdown and isn’t expected to significantly affect operations, according to a person familiar with the plant’s operations.
The premium for Carbob in San Francisco narrowed 9 cents, also to a premium of 26 cents over futures.
Fuel in Portland
Conventional, 87-octane gasoline in Portland, Oregon, was unchanged at 32 cents a gallon over futures, its largest premium since July 23, 2010.
Tesoro Corp. (TSO) said it shut an API unit, which separates water and other contaminants from crude oil, at its 125,000- barrel-a-day Anacortes refinery in Washington last week for planned work.
The refinery expects to finish work on the unit, unrelated to the refining process, early this week, Mike Marcy, a Tesoro spokesman based in Martinez, California, said in an e-mailed statement Sept. 2.
The work “will have no impact whatsoever on Tesoro’s ability to fulfill its regional product supply commitments,” Marcy said.
Tesoro also shut a residual oil supercritical extraction unit, which produces feedstock for the refinery’s fluid catalytic cracking and hydrocracking units, for maintenance that may take several weeks to finish.
To contact the reporter on this story: Lynn Doan in San Francisco at ldoan6@bloomberg.net
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Dan Stets at dstets@bloomberg.net
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