WTI/RBOB Shrug At Bigger Than Expected Crude Draw

WTI/RBOB faded back from yesterday’s Libya pipeline headline-driven exuberance ahead of tonight’s API inventory data. A bigger than expected crude draw held WTI prices steady but RBOB faded very modestly after API showed a notable gasoline (and distillates) build.

API

Heading into tonight’s data, DOE had showed 5 weeks in a row of crude draws and gasoline builds.

WTI/RBOB prices barely reacted to the API data, with RBOB modestly lower…

“The Forties pipeline is coming closer to being back online, so that’s capping some of the price optimism that you might have otherwise seen from the Libya supply outage,” Michael Bokoff, an investment analyst at Manulife Asset Management in Boston, said by telephone.

The market is “probably reassured now,” Ashley Petersen, lead oil analyst at Stratas Advisors in New York, said. “I don’t think it’s going to take a very long time to fix” the Libya pipeline.

At the same time, she said, “you have a few people wrapping up their books” at the end of the year.