Oil Refiners Get a Taste of an Electric Future: Liam Denning

Here’s a glimpse of the future:

Not the sort of futuristic vision associated with the likes of Elon Musk, but Musk-adjacent nonetheless: It’s a portent of electric vehicles taking over.

The business of producing gasoline has soured of late. Benchmark gasoline crack spreads — the price difference between a barrel of crude oil and a barrel of gasoline, a proxy for gross margins — have slumped since August. At the same time, the heating oil crack, which includes diesel, has stayed relatively strong, hitting six times that of gasoline earlier this month, the widest gap in more than a decade ...