The trading company is also looking to sublet its clean products storage tank capacity of about 500,000 to 1 million bbl capacity in the Bay Area, but the response has been muted so far because of sluggish demand, unfavorable arbitrage economics and lack of a sharp price contango.   
Industry sources said that Trafigura had slowed its distillates and gasoline trading activity significantly in the past few months.   
The West Coast gasoline market witnessed an unexpected sharp price discount last summer due to an absence of major refinery issues, and also arbitrage opportunities to import gasoline from Asia were very limited.   
A Trafigura spokesman in Europe was not immediately available for comment.   The San Francisco gasoline markets have not been kind of late as it has been consistently discounted to Los Angeles. Part of the discount to L.A. naturally occurs as the high RVP in the San Francisco spot market is higher than the RVP in Los Angeles at this time of year. Currently in the Bay, CARBOB RVP is 14-psi and 12.5-psi in Los Angeles. Also, any refinery issues this fall were mostly confined to Los Angeles. There were a few in the Bay, but those seemed to be less significant.

TOUGH CHALLENGES

Since the beginning of October, just three times San Francisco CARBOB has been better than Los Angeles. During the stretch from the beginning of October to now, the average Bay discount to Los Angeles was just shy of 3cts. San Francisco CARBOB most recently was running about 2.5cts under Los Angeles.   On a year-to-date basis, however, the Los Angeles market advantage has been inside of a penny. San Francisco CARBOB enjoyed a solid stretch of about a month from mid-May into mid-June where it had a sizeable advantage to Los Angeles, which is likely to account for the lower year-to-date differential. At that time, however, L.A. CARBOB was trading at a significant discount to the futures market.   
In North America, Trafigura is an active player in the crude, clean and dirty oil products markets in the U.S. and the Caribbean.   In the U.S. and the Caribbean, Trafigura has a stronger presence in the fuel oil and crude markets than in clean products. For gasoline in the U.S., Trafigura is active in trading Colonial pipeline barrels, but gasoline blending and import activities on the Gulf Coast and Northeast are relatively limited.   
However, OPIS notes that many trading companies have been optimizing their clean storage tank space on the coasts because of a weak gasoline market and poor blending economics.   
Despite the expected pullout from the West Coast gasoline market, its other regional trading operations for clean products in the U.S. are not affected.