US Gasoline Exports Surging -- November 19, 2016

From FuelFix, an update on surging US gasoline exports, some data points:

• Valero Energy Corp shipped excess supplies to Canada instead of Colombia
• Phillips 66 sent the first gasoline shipment in 16 months to Egypt
• Mercuria Energy Group is storing 60,000 tons of gasoline blending components produced in India at an offshore site in the Bahamas
• lower refinery utilization in Latin America + abundant US export capacity = bad news for those foreign refineries
• US gasoline exports reached 1.07 million bpd, week ended November 4, 2016; first time the figure has topped 1 million bpd (somewhat of an anomaly due to two Colonial Pipeline spills which resulted in closure for six days in October; and in closure for 12 days in September)
• shipments rose 35% in the week ended November 4, 2016; have almost doubled since the September 9, 2016, Colonial outage
• the latter move corresponds with a late-August adjustment in how the EIA calculates its export data: the agency shifted to using near-real-time Customs data rather than extrapolating from monthly estimates
• two other records set simultaneously:
• US refiners and gasoline blenders churned out 10.5 mllion bbls of gasoline/day
• Gulf Coast inventories of gasoline climbed to the highest seasonal level ever
• driving demand slid about 2%