Fueling Strategy: Please fill as needed tonight, Thursday AM wholesale prices will fall another 1.5 cents then Friday AM prices will drop 6 cents – Be Safe Tonight

NYMEX Crude $ 44.70 DN $1.6500
NY Harbor ULSD $1.4102 DN $0.0609
NYMEX Gasoline $1.4122 DN $0.0361

NEWS
Oil futures marked their lowest finish in nearly three weeks Wednesday after a U.S. government report revealed a bigger-than-expected weekly increase in crude inventories.

Domestic production, meanwhile, showed a decline and with some in the market holding out hope that major oil producers will take action to stabilize the market, oil prices managed to keep a sizable gain for the month. October West Texas Intermediate crude fell $1.65, or 3.6%, to settle at $44.70 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange. The settlement was the lowest since Aug. 12. Tracking the most-active contracts, prices saw a monthly gain of roughly 7.5%, according to FactSet data—the largest since April. “This month’s gains are likely to be fleeting over subsequent months,” said Rob Haworth, senior investment strategist at U.S. Bank Wealth Management. “Fundamental data is pointing to a well-supplied market which has risks of further supply growth.”

October Brent crude on London’s ICE Futures exchange fell $1.33, or 2.8%, at $47.04 a barrel. The October futures contracts expired at the day’s settlement. The new front month November contract ended at $46.89. Tracking the most-active contracts, Brent saw a monthly rise of over 10%.

The U.S. Energy Information Administration early Wednesday reported that domestic crude supplies rose by 2.3 million barrels in the week ended Aug. 26. That was above the 600,000-barrel climb expected by analysts polled by S&P Global Platts, while the American Petroleum Institute late Tuesday reported an increase of 942,000 barrels, according to sources. Gasoline supplies fell 700,000 barrels, while distillate stockpiles climbed by 1.5 million barrels, according to the EIA. Analysts were looking for a drawdown of 1.1 million for gasoline and distillates were forecast to be unchanged for the week, according to an S&P Global Platts survey.

Overall, it was “another poor report that is not providing any evidence to market observers that the suggested tightness in the market is appearing,” said Anthony Starkey, manager of energy analysis at Platts Analytics, a unit of S&P Global Platts. The September contracts for the petroleum products expired at the Nymex settlement. September gasoline fell 3.6 cents, or 2.5%, to $1.412 a gallon and September heating oil lost 6.1 cents, or 4.1%, to $1.410 a gallon. For the month, prices were up 6.9% for gasoline and up 10.5% for heating oil, compared with the July 29 settlements for the front-month contracts.

October natural gas ended at $2.887 per million British thermal units, up 6 cents, or 2.1%. For the month, it was up 0.4%.

“Petroleum demand has hit its seasonal peak, along with refinery runs,” Starkey said in commentary following the data. “This implies we will again begin to see outsized builds in crude inventories in the weeks ahead, especially if imports remain as robust as they have been recently.” Total crude imports were reported at 8.9 million barrels a day for last week—that is the highest level of crude imports for this week of the year going back to 2010, he said. Total oil production stood at 8.488 million barrels a day, down 60,000 barrels a day from a week earlier, the EIA said. The EIA report showed that U.S. production “fell moderately for the second week in a row after the mid-August ‘re-benchmarked data’ was released,” said Tyler Richey, co-editor of The 7:00’s Report. The report released on Aug. 17 include a note essentially explaining that supply data include an adjustment to address a “disconnect” between the weekly petroleum report, monthly petroleum supply report and other data.

Factoring in the adjusted data, the four-week moving averages for U.S. production remain slightly positive at plus-7,000 barrels a day, according to Richey. “The key takeaway from the report is that, including the ‘re-benchmarked’ data, the decline in U.S. production has apparently stalled,” he said. “The U.S. remains the world’s only ‘swing producer’, so if domestic output is no longer declining and international producers are continuing to pump at max capacity all while petroleum demand growth is soft, that creates a bearish economic equation for energy markets,” said Richey. Meanwhile, Starkey noted that some of the output decline in the latest week “could be attributed to estimates of how much offshore production has been taken offline recently in preparation for potential storm impacts in the Gulf of Mexico.”

The Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement estimates that about 19.5% of Gulf of Mexico oil production has been shut in and around 10.6% of natural-gas output has been shut in as of Wednesday due to Tropical Depression No. 9. That tropical depression, meanwhile, was upgraded to a tropical storm—Hermine—by the National Hurricane Center. Looking ahead, “over the rest of the year, we believe [oil] prices are likely to be range bound, reflecting our view that the oil market is unlikely to rebalance supply and demand growth until 2017,” said Haworth.