EU refiners maintain operations despite natural gas prices

Crude prices rallied above 73.5 $/b at the prompt as European diesel cracks rallied in the wake of TTF prices reaching 180 EUR/MWh, which means refiners are now supporting both record CO2 and natural gas costs to maintain the diesel production. Still, November EU-16 runs were surprisingly holding, with an expansion of 4%, to 9.4 mb/d, while the distillate output reached 4.95 mb/d when Europe at large usually consumes 6.1 mb/d in a month of November, leaving the continent short of about 1 mb/d or 5 VLCC per week. Indian and Japanese refining runs were also strengthening, with November Indian runs at 5.25 mb/d and Japanese runs at 2.9 mb/d last week, indicating that the omicron demand impact is still not observed.