Crude oil inventories

It seems like everyone has an opinion about the Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR), and everyone is at least a little bit right. For example, many assert the SPR provides a helpful crude oil supply buffer in the event of a major disruption from, say, a strong hurricane in the Gulf of Mexico or a war in the Middle East. Others say the market can take care of itself — the SPR just muddies the waters by getting government (and worse yet, politicians!) involved. Still others say the oil market has changed dramatically since the SPR was established almost a half-century ago and that the strategy behind the reserve should be revised in response to those changes. In today’s RBN blog, we discuss the very gradual refilling of the SPR after a big draining — and an ongoing debate about the reserve’s future.

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 world is in desperate need of more crude oil right now and anybody with barrels is scouring every nook and cranny for any additional volume that can be brought to market. Some of that may come from increased production, but the oil patch is a long-cycle industry, just coming off one of the most severe bust periods ever, and it will take time to get all the various national oil companies, majors, and independents rowing in the same direction again. For now, part of the answer will be to drain what we can from storage — after all, a major purpose of storing crude inventories is to serve as a shock absorber for short-term market disruptions. To that end, the U.S. is coordinating with other nations to release strategic reserve volumes to help stymie the global impact of avoiding Russian commodities. Outside of reserves held for strategic purposes though, commercial inventories have already been dwindling as escalating global crude prices have been signaling the market to sell as much as possible. Stored volumes at Cushing — the U.S.’s largest commercial tank farm and home to the pricing benchmark WTI — have been freefalling for months, which raises the question, how much more (if any) can come out of Cushing? In today’s RBN blog, we update one of our Greatest Hits blogs to calculate how much crude oil is actually available at Cushing.

Russia’s war on Ukraine turbocharged global crude oil prices and spurred price volatility the likes of which we haven’t seen since COVID hit two years ago. The price of WTI at the Cushing hub in Oklahoma — the delivery point for CME/NYMEX futures contracts — has gone nuts, and the forward curve is indicating the steepest backwardation ever. In other words, the market is telling traders in all-caps, “SELL, SELL, SELL! Sell any crude you can get your hands on. It’s going to be worth far less in the future.” So anyone with barrels in storage there for non-operational reasons is pulling them out, and fast! In today’s RBN blog, we look at the recent spike in global crude oil prices and what it means for inventories at the U.S.’s most liquid oil hub.

Much like the world at large, the crude oil market has been healing from the ravages of COVID-19. Overall, market conditions are far better than they were in April 2020, when global oil consumption, crushed by pandemic-related lockdowns, slumped to 80.4 MMb/d, a 17% decline from the start of last year and a 20% drop from April 2019. Demand has been rebounding in fits and starts for a full year now — recovering from downturns is what markets do. But this recovery has gotten a big assist: 10 members of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), acting in concert with 10 non-members, have restrained crude oil production in a program unprecedented in scale and duration. Now, oil prices are high enough to revive activity by some producers outside the so-called OPEC+ group. For at least the rest of this year, in fact, the market looks like a steel-cage match between crude supply subject to coordinated management and supply governed only by raw market signals. Today, we look at oil-market projections from three important agencies and estimate demand for oil not supplied by the OPEC+ exporters.

The weekly estimate of commercial crude oil inventories in the U.S. Department of Energy’s Weekly Petroleum Status Report — and the week-on-week change in those inventories — are among the most closely watched numbers in the oil sector. And for good reason. After all, the numbers help the market assess shifts in the supply/demand balance, a critical consideration in determining crude oil prices and signaling the need for more — or less — imports, exports, and of course production. In 2017, with a mandated drawdown in the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, it is now important to track weekly withdrawals from the SPR as well because of the effect they can have on commercial stocks. Today we discuss recent and planned SPR drawdowns and their effect on the supply/demand balance and crude oil prices.

Today OPEC convened in Vienna, expecting to extend production cuts for another nine months beyond June 30. Both the OPEC and NOPEC countries have generally kept to their commitments since January, which has been extremely good news for U.S. producers; they are enjoying higher prices, steadily improving economics and above all, the opportunity to capture market share from OPEC/NOPEC. Since the deal was announced this past November, U.S. production is up 600 Mb/d — about half of OPEC’s promised 1.2 MMb/d cut — and at this rate U.S. producers will have grabbed all of OPEC’s forgone market share by the end of the year. Put simply, the U.S. has taken on a leading role in international oil markets, and as a result it’s now more important than ever to understand on a more granular and real-time level what’s going on in U.S. crude production, imports, exports and inventory. In today’s blog we examine how U.S. producers have been profiting from OPEC/NOPEC efforts to curtail worldwide supply and prop up prices, and how RBN’s new weekly report, “The Gusher,” tracks the key factors affecting U.S. crude.

Last week, crude oil prices dropped below $50/bbl, in part due to continued increases in U.S. crude oil inventories, and fell further over the next few days. Then yesterday, prices perked up by $1.14 to $48.86/bbl; again one of the factors was the weekly inventory number from the Energy Information Administration which showed inventories down by a fraction of a percentage point for the week. The market seems to react spontaneously to changes in that crude-stocks statistic. Up is bearish, down is bullish. These days even a very modest decline in inventories is bullish. But serious analysis requires a more detailed, more nuanced understanding of why crude oil inventories behave as they do. Were inventories driven up by higher production or lower refinery runs? By higher imports? By lower exports? The reasons behind the inventory change are more important than the change itself. Today we continue our series on the modeling of U.S. crude oil supply and demand, and the sourcing of input data used in those calculations.

The latest sharp drop in crude oil prices, which was blamed in part on unexpected gains in already record-high U.S. inventories, is a stark reminder of the importance of understanding and routinely calculating estimates of the oil supply/demand balance. Only by keeping up with the ever-changing relationship between crude availability and crude consumption—and by anticipating shifts in that relationship—can oil traders and others whose daily success or failure depends on crude pricing trends make informed decisions. Today we begin a blog series on the modeling of U.S. crude oil supply and demand, and the sourcing of input data.