The U.S. Energy Information Administration showed that crude oil inventories decreased by 400,000 barrels over the week to July 15, versus the expected 748,000-barrel build compiled by a Bloomberg survey.
On Tuesday, the American Petroleum Institute reported that crude oil inventories grew by 1.86 million barrels for the week to July 15.
Last week, the EIA report showed a build in crude oil inventories of 3.3 million barrels—a rare occurrence in the middle of peak driving season in the United States, but helped along by the amount of crude oil released from the nation’s Strategic Petroleum Reserve.
For gasoline, the EIA reported an inventory increase of 3.5 million barrels, adding to the previous build of 5.8 million barrels in the week prior.
Gasoline production in the week to July 15 averaged 9.4 million bpd, up substantially from the previous week’s 8.9 million bpd.
Middle distillates inventory saw a decrease of 1.3 million barrels for last week, with production averaging 5 million barrels per day. The previous week saw an increase of 2.7 million barrels in distillates inventories, with production averaging 5.1 million bpd.
While oil prices were trading down on the day in the runup to the release, oil prices were still trading above $100. At 9:25 am ET, WTI was trading down $1.46 per barrel at $102.80 (-1.40%), with Brent trading down $1.73 to $105.60 (-1.61%) per barrel as recession fears once again trump the tight supply situation.
U.S. refinery run rates continue to push the capacity limits, with the average for last week at 93.7% million bpd. This compared with 94.9 percent a week earlier.
Crude oil imports averaged 6.5 million bpd last week, which compared with 6.7 million bpd a week earlier.
At the time of writing, Brent crude was trading at $105.80 per barrel, with West Texas Intermediate trading at $102.50 per barrel.
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By Julianne Geiger for Oilprice.com
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Obviously USA consumers have been on a "buyers strike" against the entire ICE Platform and all that goes with that for decades now as exemplified by Tesla but now so many others in both the BEV, Hybrid, PHEV and natural gas conversion Fleet vehicles and of course recession risk has soared to start 2022 as well and for obvious reasons.
Still this is a very powerful growth driver going forward especially when coupled with the US natural gas boom which also continues unabated as well as modestly higher interest rates and a stronger US Dollar. *"This ain't Argentina!"* by way of example in how to do everything wrong. Looking forward to seeing Tesla's numbers as I think that will set the pace for "Wall Street growth" for 2nd half 2022 as well as the implications of the colossal blunder by Putin in trying to and continuing to try to take on *ALL* of Ukraine with no end in sight for that mess.