Soaring fuel costs beginning to weigh on global demand, says Vitol

The global surge in the cost of fuel is starting to weigh on demand, according to the world’s biggest independent oil trader.

Consumers are being hit by the run-up in petrol, diesel and other oil products, Mike Muller, head of Asia at Vitol Group, said on Sunday on a podcast produced by Dubai-based Gulf Intelligence.  

“There’s very clear evidence out there of economic stress being caused by the high prices, what some people refer to as demand destruction,” said Muller, who is based in Singapore. It’s “not just oil, but also liquefied natural gas”.

Prices for refined fuel have reached record highs in the US this year and surged in most other countries, contributing to a rise in inflation. They have climbed even more than crude oil — which is up almost 45% to $110 barrel — in large part because of the disruption to Russian flows after Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine and the imposition of Western sanctions. That worsened a global shortage of spare capacity caused by years of underinvestment in refineries.

The so-called crack spread that refiners get from turning West Texas Intermediate crude into petrol and diesel has reached $50 a barrel, more than three times the average for this century. On Friday, ExxonMobil said its second-quarter refining earnings jumped to $5.5bn.

“Refining margins are at levels that nobody would’ve predicted,” Muller said. “The consensus out there seems to be that they cannot possibly go even higher than this.”