Both benchmarks fell today: Brent settled at $110.67/bbl (-0.87%) and WTI at $102.03/bbl (-0.73%), with the Brent-WTI spread tightening to $8.64. The move looked like a modest give-back of the geopolitical premium, yet the domestic heavy-end chain went the other way.

Fuel oil closed at 5,418 yuan/tonne, up 2.13%, and bitumen at 5,110 yuan/tonne, up 3.34%. An equal-weighted basket of the two gained roughly 2.7% on the day while crude was down. Net of the crude move, the product basket outperformed crude by about 3.5 percentage points - precisely the swing that pulls refinery margins back from the squeeze of the past two weeks.

The structure matters: bitumen's gain was not driven by road demand but by tightened supply after refiners shifted residue into bonded bunker blending and cut coker runs; fuel oil rose on winter bunker restocking. The bids sit on the supply and inventory side, not demand, so durability depends on upcoming vessel schedules and coker operating rates.

For SNSUC's transshipment book, the takeaway is that the listing formula anchors to Brent, but the landed margin of downstream heavy products must be computed separately. A softer Brent plus a stronger yuan (USD/CNY at 6.6613) lowers the RMB landed cost of dollar crude, while domestic products firm up - leaving room in the feedstock window for short-haul light-sweet grades such as ESPO, Dubai and Oman.