Saudi Storage -- September 18, 2019

This may be the most interesting "thing" being talked about over at twitter right now. These are the tea leaves:

• the attack was worse than first thought
• it will take longer than first forecast for Saudi to be back to "normal"
• it appears the end of September is the earliest Saudi would be back to "normal"
• most suggest back to "normal" will occur NET the end of October
• most agree that 5 million bopd were knocked out of the "pipeline" by the attack
• Saudi says they will make up the difference from their oil in storage
• the most interesting thing over on twitter regarding Saudi storage: no one really has the same number
• I've seen figures as low as 60 million bbls in storage
• I've seen figures as high as 400 million bbls in stoage
• the most "consistent" figure coming from the more "credible" sources has been 160 million bbls in storage
• prior to the attack, Saudi Arabia was dropping the amount of oil in storage for a number of reasons
• prior to the attack, in the month of July, 2019, Saudi Arabia's crude oil storage dropped by 8 million bbls

With all that data, it's easy to come up with some back-of-the-envelope numbers. We'll come back to this later but see if you see what I'm seeing.

Later, 8:43 p.m. September 18, 2019: let us continue. I think this is a most incredible graphic. For some reason, Saudi Arabia has been deliberately filling customers' orders with oil from storage for the past several months, not from "new" oil:

This is an amazing graphic. Spend some time thinking about it.