Michael Wittner Capacity Quotations

The upstream and downstream constraints are real and long-term and we're seeing almost daily examples of them. We're going to have a very strong price environment until the steam is taken out of demand or until investment catches up and restores a spare capacity cushion to production and refining.

Winter heating oil and gas oil stocks are comfortable right now, but we've lost a lot of refining capacity in the U.S. It's amazingly bullish. That's the bottom line.

Last week's bearish and pessimistic mood was overdone, considering that almost 900,000 barrels per day of U.S. refining capacity was still down (pre-Rita), and that global product demand is forecast to increase by 3.5 million barrels per day between September and December.

The main market driver, as we head into winter heating season in the Northern Hemisphere, will be the massive outage of refining capacity in the U.S. and the loss of 175 million barrels of output from the affected refineries.