24 Quotes by Rakesh Shankar

The possibility of a warmer than expected summer, along with a spike in crude oil prices and a freak heat wave in Texas that led to a surge in demand for natural gas all helped boost natural gas futures prices to well above $8 this week. Prices look to stay there in the near term, despite the record inventories.

There are some fears now in the natural-gas market of a return to colder than average weather for the next few weeks.

There is a real risk that U.S. refineries will be unable to sufficiently bring back capacity in time for the summer driving season. This will force increased reliance on gasoline imports, and higher prices for consumers.

Refinery utilization still remains very weak, with refineries still lagging in their recovery from an aggressive March maintenance schedule.

The ample supply of stocks for all energy products should continue to place downward pressure on prices in the near term.

Traders are now starting to worry more about demand destruction than about supply disruptions.

This report marks a healthy start to the gasoline buildup for the summer driving season. A few more weeks of this kind of healthy build will help further assure the market that gasoline prices this summer will head south.

With production along the Gulf Coast slowly, but surely coming back on line, the outlook for inventories is positive.

We are entering spring with near-record levels of inventory. A recent cold spell notwithstanding, few people now care about surprises in this release, seeing as how total inventories are nearly 70% above average.