Regional product markets short-term outlook March 2023

This update incorporates all of the regional crude runs and product-by-product supply-demand balances through to end-2024 on a regional level. In the near term we have made a downward revision to European crude runs in Q1 2023 given higher unannounced maintenance, while we have raised our Q1 outlook for Russian crude runs given distillate exports maintained at around 900kb/d in February, 100kb/d higher than we originally forecast. For Q2 2023, global runs are revised lower driven by a sharp increase in maintenance in China, with additional outages added in the US and South Africa. Lower supply in Q2 2023 could tighten global distillate markets, but weaker demand in Europe and the US are lower net import requirements are seen to broadly offset the loss in refining supply. The distillate tightness we were expecting is still likely to emerge, but the focus switches to Q3 2023, when demand is expected to recover in the Atlantic basin and growth in China accelerates.