US oil data from the US Energy Information Administration for the week ending December 16th indicated that after a big drop in our oil imports and a big decrease in those mysterious oil supplies that could not be accounted for, we needed to pull oil out of our stored commercial crude supplies for the 5th time in 6 weeks, and for the 16th time in the past 35 weeks, despite another sizable release of oil from the SPR.
Oil prices crashed along with global financial markets on Friday following the British vote on Thursday to exit the European Union (typically referred to as "Brexit"), which is widely expected to precipitate a period of political instability in Europe.
On Monday of last week, the U.S. Energy Information Administration posted an article on their daily blog (Today in Energy) titled "United States remains largest producer of petroleum and natural gas hydrocarbons".. The article featured a graph of our production of gas and oil vis a vis that of Russia and Saudi Arabia and went on to tell the familiar story about how fracking made it possible for our output of gas and oil to pass that of Russia in 2012
This week's oil data from the US Energy Information Administration showed that our oil inventories fell for the first time in 8 weeks, as our imports of oil also fell to their lowest in 8 weeks, and refiners used more crude than they had in any prior week this year.
The reality of the crude oil glut finally caught up with the oil price rally that had been driven by rumors of an OPEC / Russian pact last week, as oil prices fell 5% in their first weekly loss since mid-February. Almost the entirety of that drop occurred on Wednesday, after the EIA release of the weekly oil data, which showed a near record addition to our already record crude stockpiles.
Recent comments