By the OGJ Online Staff
HOUSTON, Apr. 20 -- Home heating oil and gasoline moved higher on the New York Mercantile Exchange Thursday upon reports of a gasoline unit outage at Valero Energy Corp.'s Corpus Christi, Tex., refinery.
Valero said a problem developed early Thursday at its main gasoline unit at the 215,000 b/d refinery, adding executives had no estimate yet on repair schedules. The 90,000 b/d hydrocarbon cracker can produce about 70,000 b/d of reformulated gasoline.
Analysts said the market reacted quickly to the outage because refineries have started to accelerate gasoline production in anticapation of rising demands during summer driving season.
May home heating oil gained 0.27¢ to finish at 78.46¢/gal while unleaded gasoline for May rose by 0.81¢ to end at $1.0686/gal.
The May contract for benchmark US sweet, light crude declined by 13¢ to end at $27.82/bbl while the June contract dropped by 35¢ to end at $28.20/bbl. But the May and June oil contracts rose in after-hours electronic trading on the NYMEX to $27.88/bbl and $28.26/bbl, respectively.
Natural gas for May dropped 4.7¢ to settle at $5.10/Mcf.
In London on the International Petroleum Exchange, the June contract for North Sea Brent dropped 46¢ to end at $26.83/bbl while the July contract declined 38¢ to end at $26.88/bbl.
On the IPE, the May natural gas contract settled at the equivalent of $3.46/Mcf, up 3¢.
The average price for the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries' basket of seven crudes dropped 9¢ to $24.95/bbl.
