Continuing my growing fascination with the oil market and how prices are worked out, I followed up references to "US inventories". By itself, it meant absolutely nothing to me. Utterly vague. Inventories of what? Crude? Refined products?
Turns out, it's all of those things. A more user-friendly format can be found here.
The information is more or less raw. There is no contextual or analytical information other than a comparison to stocks in previous months and a year ago.
A couple things stand out. Imports of crude and refined products appear to be down (2.4%) to a greater extent over last year than demand has been reduced (1.3%). Refineries are operating at 87.9% of capacity. Overall, inventories are falling as stocks are drawn down.
One can't draw too much from this single snapshot, but it's been useful to look at the raw data and try to make sense of it. Now off to find differing views on how to analyse what I'm looking at. I have no historical perspective on this single snapshot, but looking at it at least provides the basis for questions that enable further investigation.
With imports down over the previous week and stocks falling, one would hope to not see that trend continue.
General Debate 06 October 2025
1 hour ago
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