CRUDE OIL INVENTORIES WEEK ENDING 01/07/2022

Jan 12, 2022

Thomas Thornton

Crude: -4.553M

Cushing: -2.468M

Gasoline: 7.961M

Distillates: 2.537M

Not a bad report this week. That said, not as great as it looks at the outset. The large draws at Cushing were due to weather-related outages of the Keystone pipeline that directs WCS from Canada into Cushing where it is stored. The pipeline was down for 1.5 days, which accounts for most of the draw. That said, Cushing is getting dangerously low again. We also had production slowdowns in the Bakken due to the deep freeze.

Imports were up a 185K bpd (1.295M barrels on the week) and exports down -599K bpd (4.193M barrels on the week. we also had a small SPR release of 437K barrels that were taken out of the SPR and added back into commercial crude inventories. The ‘ungood” part is that refineries operated at 88.4% which is down from 89.7% last week, and we had a rather large gasoline build. That said, we are in a seasonal downtime for gasoline consumption, particularly with the freezing weather conditions. Total motor gasoline stocks still remain 3% below the five-year average for this time of year. Even with the distillate build this week, we are now about 15% below the five-year average for this time of year as this build is still not making up for the huge draws we saw this summer when we should have been building for the winter season. Propane/propylene inventories decreased by 3.4 million barrels last week and are about 6% below the five-year average for this time of year. Total products supplied (implied demand) averaged 20.8 million barrels a day. I will take anything over 20M barrels per day., considering it is winter and Omicron is raging causing people to stay home.

This report is still positive for all O&G sectors, with a little pressure on refiners.

EIA PETROLEUM INVENTORIES VS INVENTORIES FOR THE SAME WEEK ENDING IN PRIOR YEARS