Reliance Industries Ltd has sent its first shipment of petrol in two years to the US from its new plant, a shipbroker said.

Hess Corp chartered the tanker King Douglas to transport petrol to New York, starting June 28, Singapore-based Millennium Chartering Pte, a ship brokerage, reported last month. Lorrie Hecker, a spokeswoman for Hess, and Manoj Warrier, a Reliance spokesman, declined to comment.

The cargo, signalling a new source of global supply, will arrive as US petrol inventories are climbing and prices are falling. Stockpiles of petrol rose 1.44 million barrels last week, or 0.7%, to 214.6 million, the highest since April 17, the US Energy Department said on Wednesday. Analysts surveyed by Bloomberg News had expected an increase of 875,000 barrels.

?The growing amount of global refinery capacity is expected to pressure refining margins both in the United States and around the world,? said Andy Lipow, president of Lipow Oil Associates LLC in Houston. The ?increased production of gasoline and distillate is more than adequate to satisfy near term oil demand.?

Mike Reardon, a Houston-based vice-president at freight-derivatives broker Imarex ASA, said in an interview that shipbrokers dealing in refined products expect the vessel to arrive this month. Reliance will be supplying fuel to Hess from its new 580,000-barrel-a-day plant in Jamnagar, Reardon said.

Reliance is currently selling fuel through Hess, said a company official on Tuesday, who spoke on condition of anonymity. Reliance has leased storage space from Hess, he said, without giving capacity details.

The ship, which can carry as much as 626,000 barrels of petrol, is due to arrive in New York on July 18, according to Bloomberg vessel-tracking data.

The new refinery began operating in December. It?s located next to an older plant that can process 660,000 barrels a day. Together, they make up the largest refining complex in the world, according to Reliance.

Global crude distillation capacity is forecast to increase by 7.6 million barrels a day between 2008 and 2014, the International Energy Agency said on June 29 in its Medium-Term Oil Market Report. The rise is more than twice the 3.2 million barrels of projected oil demand growth.

?There?s all these export refineries being built in India and China,? Bjorn Moller, chief executive officer of Teekay Corp, the world?s largest shipowner, said in a June 23 interview. ?They have surplus product, it gets shipped to the Atlantic. You?re seeing crude oil shipped to Asia, refined, and shipped back to the Atlantic.?

Global refining margins dropped to an average of $4.98 a barrel in the second quarter of this year compared with $8.25 a year earlier, according to BP Plc data. Margins started this quarter averaging $2.17 a barrel, the data show.

Asian refinery capacity, led by India and China, has grown by about 1.1 million barrels per day since the beginning of 2008, according to Teekay. India and China have a combined 10.6 million barrels a day of refining capacity.

Earlier in March, Reuters had reported that Reliance had sold its first non-oxygenated gasoline cargo, a grade acceptable to countries such as Australia and the US, for $1 a barrel.