Weekly Oil Data
Inventories, Exports, Imports, and Refinery Utilization
MAIN TAKEAWAY
While commercial crude oil inventories continued to build with an ongoing decline in refinery utilization, US crude exports surged to the highest level in history! While there is a case to be made about crude quality in the shale plays, and how additional condensates have to be exported, we believe that today’s number settles the confusion about the large adjustments reported recently by the EIA (the difference between estimated demand and estimated supply, and the large drop in exports two weeks ago: the average 4 weeks of exports is close to the average).