The Crude Oil Market Still Needs Another 18 Months To Re-Balance -- August 6, 2017

I'm not going to look for the posts, but I've always suggested that the prices operators paid to get into the Permian were a bit excessive, to put it mildly. The data seems to bear that out -- see this Bloomberg story at Rigzone. The story was not particularly noteworthy, but the last line of the article is in line with my own calculations regarding time to "re-balance." From the linked article:

"The market still needs about another year and a half for demand to catch up."

There may be subtle differences between "re-balancing" and the phrase "for demand to catch up." I don't know. It seems they are saying about the same thing.

I define "re-balancing" based on historical "days of crude oil supply." For the longest time, 22 days of US crude oil supply seemed to be the "norm." We last saw 22 days of US crude oil supply back in 2014. See graph below. It's hard to believe: we actually hit16.5 days on January 23, 2004.

I believe the high is 34.2 days (February, 2017 -- just a few months ago). Currently the number is around 28 days of supply, during the heavy summer driving season.

It will be interesting to see the figure in October when the driving season is over. By the way, here is another post that is interesting to read in hindsight.