Oil Last Week News

Mauritian volunteers fished dead eels from oily waters on Tuesday as they tried to clean up damage to the Indian Ocean island's most pristine beaches after a Japanese bulk carrier leaked an estimated 1,000 tonnes of oil.The ship, MV Wakashio, owned by Nagashiki Shipping and operated by Mitsui OSK Lines Ltd, struck a coral reef on Mauritius' southeast coast on July 25 and began leaking oil last week, raising fears of a major ecological crisis.Activists told Reuters that dead eels were floating in the water and dead starfish were marked by the sticky black liquid.

U.S. sanctions imposed last month on subsidiaries of vast Chinese shipping fleet Cosco have given an unexpected boost to European refiners as less crude oil from the North Sea and West Africa heads east, traders and analysts said.Freight rates have soared as oil producers scramble for non-blacklisted vessels, discouraging longer-distance voyages.Complex refining margins for advanced facilities capable of extracting even more valuable products like diesel and gasoline, have been especially strong in Europe, industry sources said.The U.S.

Oil companies Shell and Phillips 66 together bought 6.4 million barrels of oil last week from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR), according to a Department of Energy document released on Tuesday. Shell bought 6.2 million barrels of oil and Phillips 66 bought 200,000 barrels on Jan. 18, according to the department document, seen by Reuters. The federal government held the sale to fund a revamp of the emergency oil stash, which is stored in salt caverns in Louisiana and Texas along the Gulf Coast. The Department of Energy had said it would sell up to 8 million barrels as part of its modernization program. Shell will take delivery of 1.7 million barrels of oil to a vessel, the documents said, while the remainder of the barrels are slated for pipeline delivery. The U.S.

An oil company set up by Libya's eastern government is preventing a tanker from loading a cargo for its Tripoli rival, the National Oil Corporation (NOC), officials said on Tuesday. The eastern company, also calling itself the National Oil Corporation (NOC), ordered workers at Marsa el-Hariga port in eastern Libya not to load the tanker, which had been waiting for two days, a port official said. An eastern NOC official said the move was in line with the east's attempt to export a shipment of 650,000 barrels of oil last week in defiance of the authorities in Tripoli, part of a power struggle between Libya's rival administrations. The tanker, Seachance, had been initially due to load on April 26-28 and was part of the Tripoli NOC's loading programme, an NOC official in the capital said.