From July 3, 2022, the lede:
US oil supplies at an 18 year low, SPR at a 36 year low, total oil + oil products supplies at a 13½ year low.
From the update:
The US oil data reported this week by the US Energy Information Administration includes updated data for the week ending June 17th, which should have been published last week but wasn't due to a hardware failure, and the new data for the week ending June 24th, published on schedule this week...while we're going to cover that most recent update as we usually do, we'll also try to include the most important changes for the week ending June 17th in our narrative... The EIA's data for the week ending June 24th showed that after a big increase in our refinery throughput and a decrease in our oil imports, and even after the addition of more than a half million barrels per day in oil supplies that could not be accounted for and another big oil withdrawal from the SPR, we had to pull oil out of our stored commercial crude supplies for the 5h time in 7 weeks, and for the 19th time over the past 31 weeks…our imports of crude oil fell by an average of 228,000 barrels per day to an average of 5,998,000 barrels per day, after falling by an average of 759,000 barrels per day during the week ending June 17th, while our exports of crude oil fell by 192,000 barrels per day to 3,380,000 barrels per day, after falling by 153,000 barrels per day during the prior week, which meant that our trade in oil worked out to a net import average of 2,618,000 barrels of oil per day during the week ending June 24th, 36,000 fewer barrels per day than the net of our imports minus our exports during the week ending June 17th…over the same period, production of crude from US wells reportedly rose by 100,000 barrels per day to 12,100,000 barrels per day, after being unchanged during the week ending June 17th, and hence our daily supply of oil from the net of our international trade in oil and from domestic well production appears to have totaled an average of 14,718,000 barrels per day during the June 24th reporting week…
Meanwhile, US oil refineries reported they were processing an average of 16,666,000 barrels of crude per day during the week ending June 24th, an average of 403,000 more barrels per day than the amount of oil than our refineries processed during the week ending June 17th, while over the same period the EIA’s surveys indicated that a net of 1,387,000 barrels of oil per day were being pulled out of the supplies of oil stored in the US, after an oil storage drawdown of 1,026,000 barrels of crude per day during the week ending June 17th...so based on that reported & estimated data, the crude oil figures from the EIA for the week ending June 24th appear to indicate that our total working supply of oil from storage, from net imports and from oilfield production was 560,000 barrels per day less than what our oil refineries reported they used during the week…to account for that disparity between the apparent supply of oil and the apparent disposition of it, the EIA just inserted a (+560,000) barrel per day figure onto line 13 of the weekly U.S. Petroleum Balance Sheet in order to make the reported data for the daily supply of oil and for the consumption of it balance out, a fudge factor that they label in their footnotes as “unaccounted for crude oil”, thus suggesting there must have been an omission or error of that magnitude in this week’s oil supply & demand figures that we have just transcribed....even so, since most everyone treats these weekly EIA reports as gospel, and since these figures often drive oil pricing, and hence decisions to drill or complete oil wells, we’ll continue to report this data just as it's published, and just as it's watched & believed to be reasonably accurate by most everyone in the industry...(for more on how this weekly oil data is gathered, and the possible reasons for that “unaccounted for” oil, see this EIA explainer)….
