A Fairly Unremarkable Weekly Petroleum Report -- April 17, 2019

Weekly EIA petroleum report, link here, data points:

• US crude oil inventories decreased by 1.4 million bbls
• US crude oil inventories now stand at 455.2 million bbls, about 2% below the five-year average; and the 5-year average has been rising over the past year or so
• refineries operating at 87.7% capacity
• a fairly unremarkable report compared to the past few weeks

Re-balancing:

Week	Week Ending	Change	Million Bbls Storage
Week 0	November 21, 2018	4.9	446.9
Week 1	November 28, 2018	3.6	450.5
Week 2	December 6, 2018	-7.3	443.2
Week 3	December 12, 2018	-1.2	442.0
Week 4	December 19, 2018	-0.5	441.5
Week 5	December 28, 2018	0.0	441.4
Week 6	January 4, 2019	0.0	441.4
Week 7	January 9, 2019	-1.7	439.7
Week 8	January 16, 2019	-2.7	437.1
Week 9	January 24, 2019	8.0	445.0
Week 10	January 31, 2019	0.9	445.9
Week 11	February 6, 2019	1.3	447.2
Week 12	February 13, 2019	3.6	450.8
Week 13	February 21, 2019	3.7	454.8
Week 14	February 27, 2019	-8.6	445.9
Week 15	March 6, 2019	7.1	452.9
Week 16	March 13, 2019	-3.9	449.1
Week 17	March 20, 2019	-9.6	439.5
Week 18	March 27, 2019	2.8	442.3
Week 19	April 3, 2019	7.2	449.5
Week 20	April 10, 2019	7.0	456.5
Week 21	Apr 17, 2019	-1.4	455.2

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Putting Things Into Perspective

From twitter today:

• $5 billion / year / population of US = $5 billion / 300 million = $20/person/year
• per day = 5 cents/day/per person

Color me unimpressed / not excited about monetary concern over sanctions on Venezuela and Iran
In addition, the $5 billion / year cost contains many assumptions. The biggest assumption, of course, is that as the price of oil goes up, the price of gasoline goes up, and American drivers don't change their driving habits.