History Is Made
History was made yesterday and I am not talking about the Chicago Cubs. No, I am talking about the biggest crude-oil build since the Energy Information Administration (EIA) has been keeping records over the last 34 years. The EIA reported an astonishing 14.42-million-barrel crude oil build, blowing away market expectations! We saw a big build in the Midwest and the East Coast but none was bigger than the 8.1-million-barrel increase in the Gulf Coast that blew away expectations and had traders trying to figure just how we could offload that much oil in a week.
The truth is we probably did not. More than likely we are seeing some of the oil that was delayed due to the hurricane and tropical storms last month. It is possible that we are seeing a few weeks of builds in one week as some reporting may have been delayed. Regardless, the shocking build justifies the recent correction in price and raises the stakes for OPEC to get an agreement, especially after the cartel saw record oil output.OPEC production hit a record 34.02 million barrels a day led by an extra 400.000 barrels from Libya, Iran and Nigeria.
But overnight reports of a Nigerian pipeline attack as well as a strong dollar and a realization that the massive crude build was a one-of-a-kind could have crude oil prices rebounding. Reuters reported that militants in Nigeria's southern Niger Delta oil hub attacked a pipeline operated by the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation on Wednesday. The attack could signal another round of tensions between militants and the Nigerian government that reduced Nigerian oil production to a 10-year low. Maybe there’s not much confidence in the sustainability of Nigerian oil production.
The EIA did report drops in distillate of 1.83 million barrels and gasoline stocks of 2.21 million barrels and demand continues to be robust. In fact, the EIA reported that, "the consumption of U.S. finished motor gasoline reached a new high of 9.7 million barrels per day in June 2016, surpassing the previous one-month high of 9.6 million b/d set in July 2007. U.S. gasoline consumption during summer 2016 (June through August) increased by 169,000 b/d, or 1.8%, relative to the same period in 2015. The increase in gasoline consumption was slightly lower than the increase in driving, suggesting that fuel economy improvements slightly mitigated the increase.”
Natural gas will take center stage as the EIA looks to report inventory. Prices have collapsed because of warm weather but a subpar injection into storage could get this market rocking again.