Road safety and travel plans across the northern hemisphere have been severely disrupted by the recent cold weather. It has been an extremely difficult time for those needing to travel whether it be by private transport or by using public transport. This has caused a ripple effect on many industries as thousands of people are finding it difficult to make their way to work. The natural gas and rock salt industry are also finding this time quite tough. The cold weather is also affecting the amount of gritting material available and there does not seem to be any immediate end in sight. However there is one industry that is thriving because of the cold.
Oil related industries are the ones that are taking advantage of this mayhem. The recent cold weather has had some positive affect on the oil industry after a tough year where the demand for distillate oil products was not great. The normal trend for heating oil prices is for it to trade at a certain discount in some months which reduces during the colder months. For example, there is usually a difference of about 0.5 percent from the month of November to December. But the discount for these months in 2009 was almost double the norm falling by almost one percent.
But this alone cannot save the oil refining industry which is still not performing as it should. Just a few weeks of cold weather would not be enough to turn this industry around. The industry would still not be back to normal if this weather were to carry on in this way until April. But if there is any one industry that would be pleased about this cold weather it would definitely be the oil refining industry because it is helping it to slowly make a recovery.
Some people spend a lot of money heating their homes in the winter. Fuel such as electricity and gas show no signs of coming down in price. Savvy people are changing over to oil as a home fuel though. After the changeover they have to make sure that the storage tanks are always full of heating oil to make sure they don’t run dry in the cold weather.