Weekly Petroleum Data -- Only 38 Weeks Until US Crude Oil Stocks Reach Historical Levels -- May 24, 2017

Updates

June 12, 2017: in the last week or so, I've heard a couple of television talking heads mention that US gasoline demand has not been all that great this year. Most recent example: Memorial Day was forecast to be a huge day for gasoline demand; turned out to be mundane. We first mentioned the issue of low gasoline demand some months ago.

Original Post

Disclaimer: I do these notes quickly and there will likely be typographical and factual errors. If this data is important to you, go to the source.

Weekly oil data starting to be posted. From John Kemp, via Twitter:

• US refinery throughput accelerated -- another seasonal record, and (almost) literally off the chart
• US refinery crude processing was up 1 million b/d higher than 2016 and up 2.1 million b/d higher than the 10-year seasonal average
• gasoline stocks at record seasonal highs despite falling 0.8 million bbls to 240 million bbls last week
• gasoline stocks remain very high (as in, "off the chart")
• US commercial crude oil stocks are tightening and now just up 10 million bbls (up 2%) higher than 2016, though up an astounding 162 million bbls (up 46%) over the 10-year average (or as we say, "off the chart")
• US commercial crude stocks have risen 37 million bbls since the start of the year, compared with an increase of 55 million bbls in 2016 and a 10-year average of a 44-million-bbl increase
• US commercial crude oil stocks fell 4.4 million bbls to 516 million bbls in most recent reporting period -- if this rate of decline were to continue, US supply of crude oil would be back to its "historical average" (350 million bbls) in only 38 weeks

A "draw" of 4.4 million bbls should be an incredibly bullish sign. Let's see what the price of WTI did: dropped 30 cents; now at $51.17. Apparently "the market" was not fooled by the number.

"Weeks to RB (re-balance)" -- this is the number of weeks that it would take for US crude oil supplies to reach 350 million bbls (in storage) at the current rate of draw (the most recent number, not any averaging) (update: methodology was wrong in some parts of this table; it has been updated and corrected at this post):

Week	Date	Drawdown	Storage	Weeks to RB
Week 0	Apr 26, 2017		529	180
Week 1	May 3, 2017	0.9	528	178
Week 2	May 10, 2017	6	522	29
Week 3	May 17, 2017	1.8	520.2	95
Week 4	May 24, 2017	4.4	515.8	38

If one averages the weekly drawdown over the past four weeks (3.275 million bbls/week), then (529 - 350)/3.275 works out to 55 weeks to get back to "historical levels."

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Books On Broadway

I assume Mr Chuck Wilder has this book for sale in his bookshop: Black Elk: The Life of An American Visionary, Joe Jackson, c. 2016.

Perhaps more on this later. For anyone interested in the history of the northern Great Plains native American, this is a great book. It would make a great "Father's Day" gift.

The little I've read of it leads me to think (again) that the loss of "the fighting Sioux" as a rallying cry for any university in North Dakota was a great loss. What were they thinking?