Unaccounted Volumes Drive Large Inventory Build

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. 

The past four years have seen a boom in U.S. refining with strong margins and increased throughput.  The balance of refinery feedstock has changed from a majority of imports to a majority of domestic crude. Market inefficiencies – in the distribution system, crude quality mismatches and export restrictions have kept U.S. crude prices below international levels – bringing refiners high margins and competitive product exports. Today we look at how refiners have benefited from changing U.S. crude supplies.

U.S refiners have been processing a lot of crude so far this summer and utilization rates remain high. Crude production has leveled off and is expected by the Energy Information Administration’s (EIA) Short Term Energy Outlook to decline slightly during the second half of 2015. But the early summer market sentiment that drove crude prices up to $60/Bbl on the back of these fundamentals appears to have lost steam. Today we conclude our analysis of short term crude price prospects.