Fueling Strategy: Please fill as needed tonight, Friday AM wholesale prices will go UP a little over one penny – Be Safe Today!

NYMEX Crude $ 46.38 DN $.2600
NY Harbor ULSD $1.4863 UP $.0030
NYMEX Gasoline $1.3072 DN $.0011

NEWS
Oil futures finished at their lowest level in nearly two weeks on Thursday after U.S. government data showed a hefty weekly increase in crude stockpiles on the back of a further slowdown in refinery activity. Traders appeared reluctant to pull prices down much further after losses over the past three sessions, as data also revealed a fall in weekly domestic oil production and the market awaits Friday’s weekly count on the number of active U.S. rigs drilling for oil. November West Texas Intermediate crude settled at $46.38 a barrel, down 26 cents, or 0.6%, on the New York Mercantile Exchange. Prices haven’t settled at a level that low since Oct. 5, but they managed to pare much of their earlier losses, which took prices to lows under $45.30 in the wake of the supply data.

November Brent crude on London’s ICE Futures exchange fell 44 cents, or 0.9%, to $48.71 a barrel on the contract’s expiration day. December became the front-month contract It settled up 4 cents at $49.73 a barrel. “Crude-inventory data has shown a massive build up once again as most of refineries are in a process of their maintenance,” said Naeem Aslam, chief market analyst at AvaTrade. “Now looking at the fundamentals, they have not changed—too much supply and not enough demand.”

The U.S. Energy Information Administration reported Thursday an increase of 7.6 million barrels in crude supplies for the week ended Oct. 9. Analysts polled by Platts expected supplies to be up by 1.8 million barrels, while the American Petroleum Institute Wednesday said inventories jumped 9.3 million barrels, according to sources. But the EIA report showed that weekly total U.S. oil production fell 76,000 barrels a day to roughly 9.1 million barrels a day.

Baker Hughes on Friday will release its weekly count on active U.S. oil drilling rigs, offering the market another clue on output. “With the rig counts showing consistent falls in recent weeks, oil production should continue to fall back and eventually the surplus should be reduced by a meaningful margin to cause prices to bounce back,” said Fawad Razaqzada, technical analyst at Forex.com, in a note Thursday.

The jump in crude stockpiles came as refinery utilization fell to 86% of capacity, from 87.5% a week earlier, according to the EIA. And with utilization falling, gasoline supplies also declined by 2.6 million barrels, while distillate stockpiles eased by 1.5 million barrels last week. While builds are typical this time of the year, this is a rather large build,” said John Macaluso, an analyst at Tyche Capital Advisors. “As we continue the market battle between fundamentals and technicals, it has become more clear that despite a decrease in U.S. production, the larger companies are comfortably profitable at these prices.”