Diesel fuel prices from EIA are delayed again as futures prices fall sharply

Diesel prices are not among the figures that the Energy Information Administration will publish this week when coming out of a technology crash.

A spokesman for the EIA, a division of the Ministry of Energy, said the weekly guide prices for diesel, which form the basis for most fuel charges, would not be published late Wednesday along with EIA petrol prices, which were also delayed due to technical problems. .

The EIA announced on Wednesday at noon that gasoline figures will be released at 5pm on EDT. The day before, it was said that the EIA’s weekly summary report on close monitoring would come out in time on Wednesday at 10:30 a.m. on EDT. However, there was no reference to diesel prices in the statement.

“At the moment, there are no updates regarding diesel, except that we know it won’t be this week,” EIA spokesman Chris Higginbotham said in a FreightWaves email.

While weekly diesel and gasoline prices are usually published late on Monday, next week’s issue is scheduled to come out on Tuesday due to the Fourth of July holiday.

The EIA now has a lag in diesel prices, which includes prices on Monday, June 20, and Monday, June 27. Data for June 20 were to be published on June 21 in connection with the June 1 holiday on June 20. But Higginbot said on several occasions that the price would be in effect on June 20 and that the technical problems that befell the EIA did not affect its ability to collect the data used in the price.

Given the basis for fuel surcharges, the question arises as to how the bills are exhibited. One unidentified company sent an email to its customers stating that “communication with the calculations and we will act on the basis of FSC tariffs last week.” The reference to last week will be the price from June 13 at $ 5,718 per gallon.

It is expected that the companies will then make adjustments to the accounts based on the new figures for June 20 and 27.

If these prices are published on these dates, as well as July 5, they will be in a market that on a futures and wholesale basis has fallen significantly since June 13, but retail prices have not followed.

The price of ultra-low sulfur diesel (ULSD) on the CME commodity exchange has now fallen 53.52 cents a gallon from a recent high on June 16 to $ 4.5719. The calculation on Wednesday was $ 4.0367 per gallon, down 16.27 cents a day and down 3.87%.

But retail prices remained stubbornly “sticky”. SONAR’s DTS.USA data series shows that after a recent high of $ 5,852 per gallon on June 22, average national retail diesel prices fell to just $ 5.82 on Wednesday.

Futures markets fell sharply on Wednesday in the weekly consolidated EIA report – which the market has not seen in two weeks, and, among other things, showed that U.S. refineries are operating at 95% capacity, which is the highest level since September 2019.

This speed puts a lot of diesel on the market, even if there are other signs of declining demand. For example:

• The product supplied to distillates, which is an estimate of demand for distillates such as diesel but not jet fuel, fell nearly 300,000 barrels per day (bpd) from a week earlier to 3.568 million barrels per day. This figure is 359,000 bpd lower than the five-year average for the third week of June, excluding 2020 data. The average for five years last week was 3.927 million b / d demand for distillates. This year the figure is 90.8 percent.

• Stocks, which have been raising diesel fuel for months, are beginning to normalize. For the first time since the second week of January, distillate stocks in the U.S. exceeded 30 days. On the East Coast, which just a few weeks ago suffered from extremely limited diesel stocks, PADD 1 stocks, defined by the government of a statistical area that includes the East Coast, are just under 26.9 million barrels. Just four weeks earlier, they were at 18.8 million barrels.

• The report had bearish figures that were not directly related to diesel. U.S. oil production has reached 12.1 million barrels per day, the highest level since the last week of April 2020, when the pandemic began to sweep the world.

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