OREANDA-NEWS. February 03, 2015. Gasoline and distillate futures on both sides of the Atlantic rallied on Monday on lift from workers going on strike at nine US refineries.

European benchmark diesel futures for February delivery traded on the IntercontinentalExchange were up \\$40.00, or 8.36 percent at \\$518.25 a tonne at 12:18 p.m. EST (1718 GMT), after surging more than 10 percent to \\$527.75.

US front-month March RBOB gasoline futures on the New York Mercantile Exchange were up 5.91 cents, or 4.0 percent at \\$1.5279 a gallon, having risen 6 percent to \\$1.5680 intraday.

US March heating oil was up 4.50 cents, or 2.65 percent, at \\$1.7458 a gallon.

Prices earlier rose 4.4 percent to reach a session peak of \\$1.7770 a gallon.

On Sunday, workers at nine US refineries and chemical plants went on strike in a bid to pressure oil companies to agree to a new national contract covering workers at 63 plants. In the first walk outs since 1980, a combined 10 percent of US refining capacity was being targeted.

Only one of the plants, Tesoro Corp's 166,000-barrel-per-day (bpd) refinery in Martinez, California, was being shut because it was in the midst of planned maintenance.

The other refineries were set to continue running as operators use trained managers as replacement workers.

"Although month-end positioning appeared to provide a fertile backdrop for Friday's advance, values are following through to the upside this morning as US product markets gather additional bullish momentum off of labor strikes at several US refiners," Jim Ritterbusch, president at Ritterbusch & Associates in Galena, Illinois, said in a research note.

Brent and US crude futures seesawed but were receiving some support from the possibility that products inventories will be lowered if refinery output is curbed by the strike.

Crude futures also had support from Friday's news that oil companies idled nearly 100 rigs in the United States in the week to Jan. 30, the biggest weekly drop on record, according to the Baker Hughes Inc oil rig count.

In the cash products markets on the US Gulf Coast, cash gasoline differentials rose on short covering stemming from concerns about the strike, traders said.

A4 CBOB, or conventional regular gasoline blendstock, rose in a flurry of trades from 4.00- to 2.00-cent discounts to March RBOB futures, up 3.50 cents per gallon from Friday.

Conventional M4 gasoline was bid even with March RBOB and traded at a half-cent premium to the benchmark, also a gain of 3.50 cents.