Poll: Will US Crude Oil In Storage Increase Or Decrease In This Week's Report? -- August 28, 2017

Updates

September 2, 2017: Results of the poll here and the new data for re-balancing. 

Original Post 

A huge "thank you" to a reader for suggesting this poll. It's the best kind of poll out there: in only two or three days we will have an "official" answer to a very interesting question.

This will be fun; this will be quick. We will know the results by close of business Wednesday, August 30, 2017.

Every week, generally by 10:30 a.m. ET, the EIA provides the weekly petroleum data which includes the US crude oil "drawdown" -- how many bbls of crude oil the US has in storage (not including the Strategic Petroleum Reserve).

I've been following this story for 17 weeks and have calculated the average drawdown after each week's data has been reported, and then using the "historical norm," have calculated the number of weeks it will be before US crude oil supplies in storage are "re-balanced."

The most recent data, for example, was posted August 23, 2017:

Week	Date	Drawdown	Storage	Weeks to RB
Week 0	Apr 26, 2017		529.0	180
Week 1	May 3, 2017	0.9	528.0	198
Week 2	May 10, 2017	6	522.0	50
Week 3	May 17, 2017	1.8	520.2	59
Week 4	May 24, 2017	4.4	515.8	51
Week 5	May 31, 2017	6.4	509.9	41
Week 6	June 7, 2017	-3.3	513.2	60
Week 7	June 14, 2017	1.7	511.5	57
Week 8	June 21, 2017	2.5	509.0	62
Week 9	June 28, 2017	-0.2	509.2	71
Week 10	July 6, 2017	6.3	502.9	58
Week 11	July 12, 2017	7.6	495.3	47
Week 12	July 19, 2017	4.7	490.6	43
Week 13	July 26, 2017	7.2	483.4	38
Week 14	August 2, 2017	1.5	481.9	34
Week 15	August 9, 2017	6.5	475.4	35
Week 16	August 16, 2017	8.9	466.5	30
Week 17	August 23, 2017	3.3	463.2	29

So, what do you think? A poll is at the sidebar at the right in which we ask whether you think there will be a net drawdown when the data is posted this week. Anything less than a report of 463.2 million bbls of crude oil in US storage (not including the SPR) will be considered a drawdown.

This is going to be a tricky week. Under the best of circumstances it would have been difficult to predict (for the first two reasons noted below). But now there are so many variables:

• the total solar eclipse, August 21, 2017, resulted in the largest five-day travel migration in modern US history
• this was the last week of summer vacation and summer driving for many families with school-age children
• Hurricane Harvey (HH): crude oil cargo ships stranded off shore
• HH: crude oil exports out of Texas come to standstill
• HH: off-shore oil platforms shut down in anticipation
• HH: Eagle Ford oil fields shut in
• HH: Bakken oil destined for the gulf coast impacted?
• HH: pipelines from the Permian and the Eagle Ford pretty much shut down for duration
• HH: refineries in Gulf area shut down for duration -- taking less oil out of storage
• HH: petroleum demand comes to virtual standstill for several days in 4th largest city in the US

Clues: right now CNBC is reporting --

• nearly 15% of US refinery capacity is offline
• one million bbls/day of oil in the Houston area is not being refined 
• the last report, issued August 23, 2017, was for the week ending August 18, 2017
• this week's report should be for the week ending August 25, 2017. Hurricane Harvey hit landfall on August 25, 2017, at 10:00 p.m. Central Time