EIA Weekly Petroleum Report -- February 21, 2019

Link here.

But first, let's see what WTI is doing: down 16 cents; right at $57

• EIA weekly crude oil inventories: increased by 3.7 million bbls
• EIA weekly crude oil inventories: 454.5 million bbls; at 6% of five-year average; and the 5-year average keeps increasing
• refineries operating at an incredible low 85.9% capacity (second week in a row that we have seen incredibly low operating rate)
• both gasoline and distillate production decreased modestly last week, most background noise
• but again, imports up over 1.3 million bopd -- suggesting that the refiners still need that heavy oil to offset all the light oil from the Permian
• having said that, crude oil imports are still down 10% compared to same four-week period last year
• everything else seems unremarkable

To re-balance:

Week	Date	Change w-o-w	In Storage	Weeks to RB to 350 Million Bbls
Week 0	November 21, 2018	4.9	446.9	N/A
Week 1	November 28, 2018	3.6	450.5	N/A
Week 2	December 6, 2018	-7.3	443.2	N/A
Week 3	December 12, 2018	-1.2	442.0	Never at this rate
Week 4	December 19, 2018	-0.5	441.5	Never at this rate
Week 5	December 28, 2018	0.0	441.4	Never at this rate
Week 6	January 4, 2019	0.0	441.4	Never at this rate
Week 7	January 9, 2019	-1.7	439.7	A long, long time
Week 8	January 16, 2019	-2.7	437.1	Won’t happen in my lifetime
Week 9	January 24, 2019	8.0	445.0	Won’t happen in my lifetime
Week 10	January 31, 2019	0.9	445.9	Won’t happen in my lifetime
Week 11	February 6, 2019	1.3	447.2	Won’t happen in my lifetime
Week 12	February 13, 2019	3.6	450.8	Won’t happen in my lifetime
Week 13	February 21, 2019	3.7	454.8	Won’t happen in my lifetime

In the past thirteen weeks, there were only five weeks in which crude oil inventories actually dropped, and of those five weeks, only one was remarkable: week 2 -- a drop of 7.3 million bbls.

The US crude oil inventory has actually increased significantly since 3.5 months ago, from 447 million bbls to 455 million bbls.