Crude rallied today — Brent settled at $109.93/bbl, WTI at $101.85 — but the heavy-product chain did not move in lockstep. Fuel oil's front-month contract rose 3.71% to 4,947 yuan/t, while bitumen eased 0.36% to 4,454 yuan/t, a more-than-4-point intraday gap between the two lines.

The split comes down to demand structure. Bitumen faces a narrowing construction window and soft refinery runs, so physical trading stays thin. Fuel oil draws bonded-bunker restocking plus winter power-generation stockpiling, and the Singapore 380 CST premium keeps climbing. The same vacuum-residue stream from a refinery's crude unit gets shunted toward coking or bonded bunkering depending on which side pays the better marginal return.

For SNSUC's transshipment book, the point is not the outright move but the reshuffle of crack spreads and processing margins. Brent above $109.9 lifts feedstock cost, yet firm fuel oil supports the cash flow on the by-product line and partially offsets crude-side pressure. In the delivered-cost formula for light-sweet grades like ESPO and Dubai, freight and premiums move more than the absolute flat price, so today's split has not yet reordered the delivered ranking.

Two signals to watch: whether the fuel-oil/bitumen ratio keeps widening, and whether the bonded-bunker premium rolls over. Either reversal sends refiners reallocating residue again.