The 380-cst fuel oil cash premiums rose to $3.93 a tonne to Singapore quotes, from $3.75 a tonne in the previous session. This was the highest since Jan. 3. Meanwhile, Singapore fuel oil inventories continued to report weekly declines after having reached a multi-month high in mid-December, official data released on Thursday showed. One 20,000-tonne 380-cst HSFO cargo trade was reported in the Singapore trading window.
Vitol sold the cargo to Hin Leong at a $1 per tonne premium to the balance of January quotes. No 0.5 percent low-sulphur fuel oil (LSFO) cargo trades were reported.
Inventories: Onshore fuel oil stocks fell 537,000 barrels (about 80,000 tonnes), or 3 percent, from the previous week to 18.404 million barrels, or 2.747 million tonnes, in the week to Jan. 16, data from Enterprise Singapore showed. Singapore fuel oil stocks have declined steadily over the past four weeks after hitting a near seven-month high in the week to Dec. 19 at 20.813 million barrels, or 3.106 million tonnes.
Singapore fuel oil inventories are now 8 percent lower than a year earlier. In the United States, weekly fuel oil inventories were up 0.1 percent in the week to Jan. 11 at a six-week high of 28.294 million barrels (about 4.223 million tonnes), the latest data from the Energy Information Administration showed.
The UAE's ADNOC has sold another three 90,000-tonne cargoes of straight-run fuel oil (SRFO) from Ruwais loading over Jan. 29-Feb. 3, Feb. 6-8 and Feb. 11-13 to Shell, Rongsheng and Vitol, respectively, at premiums of about $10-$15 per tonne to Singapore 180-cst quotes on an FOB basis. Since the start of 2019, ADNOC has now sold a total of eight SRFO cargoes.
ADNOC's Ruwais Refinery West's Residue Fluid Catalytic Cracker restoration project achieved mechanical completion ahead of schedule and production is planned to begin in early February, an ADNOC spokesman told Reuters on Wednesday.