A pure-play refiner owns only the downstream, so its earnings track the refining margin. An integrated major also owns the upstream, which absorbs the cost of expensive crude and offsets the squeeze downstream. Two companies process the same barrel yet…
The 3-2-1 crack spread reduces the refining margin to two products, gasoline and diesel. Jet fuel sits outside it, even though its own margin moves on a signal the other two cannot see. TL;DR Left out of the 3-2-1, the…
A refinery runs full near ninety percent, not a hundred: the last slice of nameplate capacity is a maintenance margin that cannot be squeezed out. Confuse that ceiling with empty space and a routine turnaround reads as a phantom shortage.…
In 2022, refined fuel prices climbed faster than crude. That gap, measured by the 3-2-1 crack spread, reached an all-time high, briefly turning the downstream end of oil into the most profitable link in the chain. A look back at…
The 3-2-1 crack blends gasoline and distillate into a single number, and that convenience hides something the market cares about a great deal: the two fuels do not always earn the same margin. Most of the time they move together,…
A refinery is, in the crudest terms, a spread trade: it buys crude oil, transforms it, and sells refined products. The gap between what it pays for the barrel and what it collects for the fuels is its gross margin.…
In 2022, the surge in gas prices turned the euro area’s historic current-account surplus into a deficit and amplified the euro’s fall below parity. The energy import bill is a euro-specific currency force, because it degrades the area’s terms of…
Nuclear’s distinctive value lies not in low carbon alone but in firmness: dispatchable, round-the-clock output with a capacity factor above 90 percent, where intermittent renewables struggle to cover a constant demand. TL;DR Comparing nuclear's firmness with renewables' headline price weighs…
Electricity demand from artificial-intelligence data centres, continuous and fast-growing, is rehabilitating nuclear and pushing demand upstream to uranium; its scale and its already-contracted nature set it apart from past forecasts. TL;DR Inference, the continuous serving of AI models to hundreds…
Wholesale gas prices fed through to European inflation along three channels — direct energy bills, marginal electricity pricing, industrial costs — to the point of accounting for nearly half of the 2022 inflation peak. TL;DR October 2022 marked the euro…
