EIA's Weekly Petroleum Report -- Released -- About One Hour Late -- July 14, 2021

Weekly EIA petroleum report. Link here. Delayed. Let the conspiracy theories begin. Now delayed by almost a full 45 minutes. EIA just tweeted: report to be released at 11:00 a.m. EDT. They've already missed that "deadline." Apparently EIA servers are down. Resorting to twitter to convey information?  Are the EIA servers in the cloud? If so, whose? AWS, Microsoft, Alphabet? My hunch: Microsoft. If so, explains a lot. [Later: wow! I was correct. It was related to cloud issues. See this link.]

The report, released about an hour late:

• US crude oil in storage decreased by 7.9 bbls;
• US crude oil in storage now stands at 437.6million bbls, 8% below the five-year average;
• US crude oil imports averaged 6.2 million bbls; up by 347,000 bbls from the previous week (yawn)
• refiners are operating at 91.8% of their operable capacity (yawn)
• distillate fuel inventories increased by 3.7 million bbls; 4% below their five-year average;
• jet fuel supplied was up 65.9% compared with same four-week period last year.
• comment: we need to quit comparing this year's data with last year's date. We need to start comparing this year's data with same period in 2019. But that won't happen.

WTI: following report --

• 10:36 a.m. CT: $74.62, down about 63 cents;
• 10:49 a.m. CT: $74.23, down $1.02; down 1.36%
• 10:54 a.m. CT: $74.12, down $1.13, down 1.50%
• 11:05 a.m. CT: $73.78, down $1.47, down 1.95% -- don't you just love these stories/headlines written in anticipation of the release of expected data? See below.
  

Headline, story written before data released: