In a blog posted on its website on Monday, GasBuddy highlighted that U.S. gasoline prices had fallen for four straight weeks but warned that “the streak may be in danger”.
StanChart has pointed out that such a switch would create a significant loss of optimization in the highly expensive cracking units that require feed from vacuum distillation of the heavy residual obtained by simple distillation. Canada has supplied 99.89% of all heavy imports into Midwest refineries over the past decade; the low substitutability of this flow implies that a tariff would largely feed through to local retail prices.