US Commercial Crude Oil Inventories Increased By A Whopping 10 MIllion Bbls -- May 1, 2019

9.9 million bbls to be exact.

EIA: US crude oil inventories rise to highest levels since September,  2017.

Ben Winkley: "US crude oil inventories large enough to be visible from space."

Refiners: cut back. weekly refinery utilization off 09%.

Anas Alhajji: tried to make a case for oil going from green to red after the EIA data released; in fact; oil stayed almost flat.

It will be interesting to watch the "spin" on this.

Had you paid for Z4 research, this is the data that was forecast earlier this week -- Z4 Research / Z-Man forecasts (from twitter):

• crude: up 0.9 million bbls (off by a factor of 10)
• gasoline: down 1.0 million bbls (initial report only said gasoline inventories increased)
• distillates: down 0.8million bbls (decreased by 1.3 million bbls)
• strong gasoline demand (pending)
• a drop in net imports (wrong)

WTI: down all of 21 cents, moments after inventory number released.

WTI, later: holding at $63.41 -- folks suggest that the huge build is offset by the turmoil in Venezuela. 

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	337.2
Week 12	February 13, 2019	3.6	450.8
Week 13	February 21, 2019	3.7	343.8
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	April 17, 2019	-1.4	455.2
Week 22	April 24, 2019	5.5	460.1
Week 23	May 1, 2019	9.9	470.6

Somehow this week's numbers seem to be off slightly. If last week's inventory was 460.1 million bbls and this increase this week was 9.9 million bbls, then the inventory should be an even 470 million bbls. I must have made a typographical error.