Diesel at a Record $6.43; Ukraine Strikes Moscow's Own Refinery
Markets are closed today. New York opens Monday at 9:30 a.m. ET (4:30 p.m. in Istanbul).
Ukraine struck Moscow overnight. One of the targets was the city's own oil refinery. Mayor Sergei Sobyanin said several drones reached the site and that one hit an apartment. The extent of the damage is not yet known.
The attack fell on the final day of Russia's three-day parliamentary election. Sobyanin said more than 1,600 drones had been downed since Saturday, 450 of them headed for Moscow. Two people died in the Moscow region. In Ramenskoye, 400 people, including 70 children, were evacuated from a 21-storey building.
The Moscow refinery is not a small plant. It processed 11.6 million metric tons of crude in 2024, yielding 2.9 million tons of gasoline and 3.2 million tons of diesel.
For a U.S. reader the link runs through diesel. On Friday morning GasBuddy put the national average at $6.43 a gallon, a record. The Energy Information Administration's September 15 reading was $6.285 and AAA's was $6.269. The EIA series was up 32 cents on the week.
Here is the detail that matters: crude is getting cheaper at the same time. Brent fell 0.91% on Friday to close at $103.87, down 1.2% on the week. The constraint is not the supply of crude. It is the capacity to refine it.
Russia's six largest diesel refineries account for roughly half of the country's diesel output. Three of them either stopped or fell far below capacity in September: Kirishi is fully shut, Volgograd and NORSI are running at about 25%. Russian diesel exports fell below 1 million tons in June, against roughly 2.5 million tons a month a year earlier.