Crude Oil Imports Skyrocket to 2025 High

The U.S. Treasury Department last week announced new sanctions on Petróleos de Venezuela, S.A. (PDVSA), the national oil company of Venezuela, that effectively halts imports of Venezuelan crude oil into the U.S. Given that the Venezuelan crude imported to the U.S. is of the heavy sour variety, which is not produced in large amounts in the U.S. (except for California), certain refineries along the Gulf Coast are left scrambling to find alternative sources of feedstock for their facilities. Today, we evaluate historical crude oil imports from Venezuela, the refineries that are most heavily impacted, and the potential effects of the sanctions on U.S. refiners.

The numbers don’t add up. Literally. The most closely watched energy statistics in the world have a problem, and it’s been getting worse over the past two years. We’re talking about EIA’s U.S. crude oil supply, demand and inventory balances, which are published each week and then trued up about 60 days later in monthly data. The problem is that the balances don’t balance. EIA uses a plug number alternatively called “adjustment” or “unaccounted for” to force supply and demand to equate. That would not be an issue if the plug number was small and flipped frequently from positive to negative, likely due to timing inconsistencies with the input data. But that’s not the case. The number is mostly positive, meaning more demand than supply. And the difference can be mammoth: last week it was 2.3 MMb/d, or 18.4% of U.S. crude production. It seems like barrels are somehow materializing out of nowhere. But now we know where, because EIA just finished a 90-day study of the crude imbalance that reveals the sources of the problem and what it is going to take to fix it. In today’s RBN blog, we will delve into what has been causing the problem, what it means for interpreting EIA statistics, and what EIA is doing to address the issues.