Crude oil is the world’s most important commodity, but it’s worthless without a refinery turning it into the products that people actually use: gasoline, diesel, jet-fuel and petrochemicals for plastics. And the world’s refining industry today is in pain like never before.
“Refining margins are absolutely catastrophic,” Patrick Pouyanne, the head of Europe’s top oil refining group Total SA, told investors last month, echoing a widely held view among executives, traders and analysts.What happens to the oil refining industry at this juncture will have ripple effects across the rest of the energy industry. The multi-billion-dollar plants employ thousands of people and a wave of closures and bankruptcies looms.“We believe we are entering into an ‘age of consolidation’ for the refining industry,” said Nikhil Bhandari, refining analyst at Goldman Sachs Inc. The top names of the industry, which collectively processed well over $2 trillion worth of oil last year, are giants such as Exxon Mobil Corp. and Royal Dutch Shell Plc. There are also Asian behemoths like Sinopec of China and Indian Oil Corp., as well as large independents like Marathon Petroleum Corp. and Valero Energy Corp. with their ubiquitous fuel stations.The problem for the refiners is that what’s killing them is the medicine that’s saving the wider petroleum industry.When U.S. President Donald Trump engineered record oil production cuts between Saudi Arabia, Russia and the rest of the OPEC+ alliance in April, he may have saved the U.S. shale industry in Texas, Oklahoma and North Dakota, but he squeezed refiners.A refinery’s economics are ultimately simple: it thrives on the price difference between crude oil and fuels like gasoline, earning a profit that’s known in the industry as a cracking margin....
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