John Kemp's Weekly Crude Oil, Gasoline Tweets -- September 23, 2015

John Kemp's weekly tweets on gasoline demand and oil inventories:

• Record propane stocks show first weekly drawdown since March, residual fuel oil stocks little changed; graphs are incredible; huge records being set
• US distillate stocks fell -2.1 million bbl as refineries cut crude processing at the end of the driving season 
• US gasoline stocks stand at 23.87 days of consumption, +1.57 days over 10-yr seasonal avg and +0.39 days over 2014 
• US gasoline stocks rose +1.4 million bbl and are +8.4 million bbl over 2014 level and +7.0 million bbl over 10yr avg.  
• US gasoline consumption averaged 9.2 million b/d over the last four weeks, +270,000 b/d over 2014 (comment: I lost my bet that US gasoline consumption would hit 10 million bopd over the Labor Day weekend)
• US refinery throughput edged down -310,000 b/d but at 16.2 million b/d is in line with 2014 and equal to 10-yr high
• US crude imports were unchanged from previous week and relatively subdued at 7.2 million b/d  
• US commercial crude stocks fell -1.9 million bbl last week and have been basically flat since the start of August -- but still way above above; will move the 10-year average

One has to look at the graphs to see how the energy picture has really changed in the past year. The amount of crude oil being produced in this country is not simply setting new records; production will move the needle on 10-year averages.

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What Were They Thinking?

For The Archives

The Wall Street Journal is reporting:

The research that prompted U.S. regulatory scrutiny of Volkswagen AG ’s diesel-car emissions levels started as a routine research request.

West Virginia University’s Center for Alternative Fuels Engines and Emissions, a self-funded arm inside the school’s engineering college, was just looking for work when it answered a request in 2013 for a proposal for a project to compare U.S. diesel car performance with European models.

The request had come from the International Council on Clean Transportation, a nonprofit, European research outfit.

Three faculty members and two graduate students worked on the study. They headed to Southern California, to be close to the state’s air-quality labs and because of the wide availability of car models there. They rented a BMW X5 sport-utility with a diesel engine from a car dealer there, and two Volkswagens—a Jetta and Passat—through a website that allows people to rent out their vehicles to strangers.

They took them out and drove them hundreds of miles—measuring pollutants along the way.

What they found was puzzling: The BMW’s emission results during the test drives matched or came in under what the vehicles produced in laboratory tests. But the VWs were emitting far more than they were supposed to.

The group contacted Volkswagen to inform the company about the results.
Eventually, the West Virginia researchers, in conjunction with the ICCT, presented the results in May 2014 to the Environmental Protection Agency and the California Air Resources Board.

On Friday, the EPA accused Volkswagen of deliberately flouting U.S. air-pollution rules by installing software on nearly 500,000 U.S.-sold cars. Volkswagen acknowledged this week diesel engines in some 11 million cars world-wide contained the software.