The products desk split today. Fuel oil closed at 4,455 yuan/tonne, up 1.48%; bitumen finished at 5,156 yuan/tonne, barely up 0.08%. On the surface these look like two separate supply-demand stories — underneath, they are the same refiner residue choosing where to go.

Fuel oil's strength tracks bunkering schedules at Zhoushan and Shanghai. Each foreign-flag vessel takes several thousand tonnes of low-sulphur fuel oil, settled through the bonded "two-ends-outside" account that neither draws import quota nor pays import-stage tax. When the bunkering calendar piles up, refiners route more residue into fuel oil blending and the price gets bid up.

Bitumen, by contrast, is heading into the tail of road-construction season; terminal offtake is slowing, so even a small crude uptick cannot fully pass through. For the operator this split is an arbitrage flag: when fuel oil is firm and bitumen soft, push residue toward fuel oil for fatter per-tonne margin, then reverse the cut once winter shuts road demand entirely.