- Prior was -3186
- Gasoline +3518K vs -800K exp
- Distillates -2527K vs -1560K exp
WTI crude oil was trading at the highest levels since late September ahead of the release. On the day, it ws up $2.33 to $97.41. Meanwhile, Trump was out this morning in Montana saying the Iran war will end “very soon” and that “oil prices will drop like a rock” which is the same thing he has been saying since it started. There are no signs of imminent diplomacy.
Obviously, this report will add to the bullish narrative and that tighter distillate number will add to the tightness in products, though there’s some relief with a gasoline build.
Note that the ‘expectations’ numbers didn’t include the private numbers from late yesterday that showed a huge drawdown in US supplies.
- Crude -11.1mn barrels
- Gasoline +1.1mn bbls
- Distillate -1.5mn bbls
- Cushing +1.8mn bbl
For background, the US Energy Information Administration’s Weekly Petroleum Status Report is the most closely watched snapshot of the American oil market. It’s released Wednesdays at 10:30 am ET, or Thursday when a holiday shortens the week, and covers the week ending the previous Friday.
The headline figure is the weekly change in commercial crude oil inventories, which excludes the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. Traders compare it with analyst consensus, and a larger-than-expected build is typically read as bearish for prices while a draw is bullish. The report also tracks stocks at Cushing, Oklahoma, the delivery hub for WTI futures, where levels can have an outsized effect on the front of the curve.
Beyond crude, the report details inventories of gasoline and distillates, which include diesel and heating oil. It also includes refinery utilization, domestic crude production, imports and exports. “Product supplied” serves as a proxy for demand, measuring the volume of fuels moving out of primary storage. SPR levels are reported separately, and changes there reflect government policy rather than market forces.
The data are survey-based and noisy week to week. Swings in imports and exports alone can produce multimillion-barrel builds or draws that reverse the following week. Many analysts focus on multi-week trends, seasonal comparisons and the combined change across crude and products rather than any single number.
The American Petroleum Institute publishes its own private survey on Tuesday afternoons at 4:30 pm ET, giving markets an early read. The two often diverge, but the EIA figures are considered the official benchmark and typically drive the bigger move in crude prices.
