Craig Pennington Quotations

The refineries are entering their biggest period of maintenance. People will start to look for the refinery run rates and look for bigger-than-expected draws on gasoline.

We had a warm start to the winter but now it is starting to look a bit ugly. The focus will be on cold weather for some time to come.

People will still watch gasoline because of maintenance and subsequent specification changes.

Nigeria has always been a difficult place and now they have targeted the offshore platforms. They've never done that before. Obviously, that's very dangerous.

If we get a normal winter, we'll probably have enough inventories, but if we get a very harsh winter, inventories could collapse to unseen levels. The oil market would be very jittery with any supply disruptions.

There is an increasing challenge for OPEC next year. If you look at what people expected last year, non-OPEC supplies have disappointed and demand has been stronger. The result has been in OPEC's favor. But next year will be tougher. And they will not want prices to drop below $50 a barrel. They will need to cut production.

People are looking to product spec changes and the disruption that will be caused by product spec changes.

We've been hearing about restarts and the system will be slowly getting back on its feet.

The expectation for an inventory build is built in across all the product areas with an outside risk of a surprise on heating oil.

The past couple of days have been based on one entity's view of what January's weather will look like and that hasn't been enough to establish a price trend.

With oil prices at $60 a barrel it was a foregone conclusion they were not going to cut. If you do see disruption from Nigeria, if you do see disruption from Iran, the oil price will go substantially higher from here. So OPEC is reluctant to start turning the taps off just now.

The oil market has been driven by speculators, by hedge funds, by pension funds and by commodity indexes, but the fact of the matter is that it's mostly been driven by the fundamentals. Prices are supported by the fact that there is no spare capacity.

There isn't the spare capacity to make up for the missing production in the Gulf of Mexico. OPEC used to have 4 to 5 million barrels of spare capacity. That's down to about 1.5 million barrels a day this year.

A bit of the premium in the oil price on Iran has been taken off today. The market interpretation (of U.S. comments) is that there will be no sanctions and that oil won't be used.

A bit of the premium in the oil price on Iran has been taken off today.