Are You Kidding Me! Re-Posting! -- May 13, 2020

Wow, wow, wow. This takes me back to all those discussions we had on whether Saudi Arabia retained bragging rights as the swing producer, or whether US shale was the "new" swing producer. We're not talking about how much oil either Saudi Arabia or US shale oil could put into off-shore tankers; we're talking about actual change in production.

Headline writers still writing "the expected narrative."

Re-posting. I'm sure I'm misreading something. 

Swing producers? US shale?  I don't know. We'll have to look at the numbers six months from now, but it certainly appears that US shale operators can "turn on a dime." I think it's fascinating. News out of the Mideast suggest weeks, if not months, of negotiations, talk, fake news, etc., and then we might finally see some data. US shale -- in the Bakken it's a daily update. In the Permian maybe a bit longer, but certainly within a month we see production responding to geopolitical events. Whatever. Idle rambling. Waiting for EIA data. [Update: five minutes later -- wow, talking about turning on a dime! See below.]

EIA, weekly data, link here, and here, pending, released at 9:30 a.m. CT -- are you kidding me? --

• US crude oil inventories decreased by 0.7 million bbls from the previous week
• US crude oil inventories now stand at 531.5 million bbls -- 11% above the already fat five-year average;

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 68	March 18, 2020	2.0	453.7
Week 69	March 25, 2020	1.6	455.4
Week 70	April 1, 2020	13.8	469.2
Week 71	April 8, 2020	15.2	484.4
Week 72	April 15, 2020	19.2	503.6
Week 72	April 22, 2020	15.0	518.6
Week 73	April 29, 2020	9.0	527.6
Week 74	May 6, 2020	4.6	532.2
Week 75	May 13, 2020	-0.7	531.5

***************************