Oil Steadies After Weekly Slide, Europe Outages Support

Gasoline futures lagged the complex, dipping 3.2 cents to settle at $3.0125 a gallon after tropical storm Dorian dissipated without causing any damage to the refining industry, and North Atlantic Refining announced its 115,000 barrel per day Come By Chance refinery in Newfoundland was fully back online.

The recent fall in the prices of ethanol credits has also weighed on gasoline, according to analysts. Refiners must purchase ethanol credits, also known as Renewable Identification numbers, to comply with environmental regulations. RINs, which traded for 5 cents late in 2012, reached record levels of $1.50 earlier this month, only to fall to around 95 cents on Monday.

Carsten Fritsch, senior oil analyst at Commerzbank in Frankfurt, said the market appeared fairly balanced, but investors had been "taking money off the table after a strong run-up a couple of weeks ago."

Supply Disruptions

Oil exports from several suppliers have been curtailed in recent weeks, stopping or reducing shipments from Libya, Iraq, the North Sea and elsewhere.

The North Sea's Forties pipeline has cut pumping rates by about 40,000 bpd because of maintenance, trade sources said, tightening supply of the crude that underpins the Brent benchmark.

Explosions rocked the eastern Libyan city of Benghazi on Sunday, prompting Marathon Oil Corp to study the sale of its stake in Waha, a key Libyan oil consortium.

The Libyan oil minister said on Monday that operations at the crude oil export terminals of Es Sider and Ras Lanuf continued as normal, despite protests and strikes.


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