US Oil Fundamentals — EIA Weekly Inventories, Production & Refining

Wednesdays at 10:30 a.m. US Eastern, covering the week that ended the previous Friday. The natural-gas storage report follows on Thursday at the same time, and Baker Hughes publishes the North America rig count on Friday at noon Central. The countdown at the top of this page tracks each of them in US Eastern wall-clock time, so it follows daylight saving automatically. When a federal holiday falls early in the week the petroleum release usually slips by a day.

They are two different surveys. The American Petroleum Institute's figures are a voluntary submission from its members, released Tuesday afternoon, the day before the EIA's; the EIA's come from a mandatory survey with far broader coverage and are the official series. The two often point the same way and sometimes do not, which is why a large API number on Tuesday evening can move prices and then be partly unwound on Wednesday morning. Only the EIA figures appear on this page.

It counts commercial crude held at refineries, in tank farms and in pipelines, and leaves out the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. The SPR only moves on a policy decision — an emergency release, an exchange, or a refill — so folding it in would mix a government choice into a series meant to show how the commercial market is balancing week to week. Commercial stocks are the barrels refiners and traders actually draw on. The SPR has its own page, with its full weekly history back to 1982.

It is the share of US distillation capacity actually running, and it explains most apparently contradictory inventory weeks. When utilization falls — for scheduled spring or autumn maintenance, an unplanned outage, or a hurricane on the Gulf Coast — refineries pull less crude out of storage, so crude stocks build, while making fewer products, so gasoline and distillate stocks draw and refining margins widen. High utilization does the reverse. Reading the stock changes without it will mislead you.

For each week of the year it shows the minimum, maximum and average of the past five years' readings for that same week, so the current line is compared against a normal seasonal path rather than a flat average. Inventories are strongly seasonal — gasoline builds through winter and draws across the summer driving season — so a figure that looks like a healthy build in absolute terms can still sit below normal for the time of year. The band is computed in your browser from roughly six years of weekly history.

It is the net futures position of commodity trading advisers, hedge funds and similar speculative accounts: their long contracts minus their short ones. It measures positioning and sentiment, not supply or demand. Two caveats are worth knowing. The data are collected as of Tuesday's close but not published until Friday afternoon, so the chart always sits a few days behind the market. And the series shown is the ICE WTI contract rather than the NYMEX one, because the CFTC's NYMEX physical-WTI series stopped in 2022 while the ICE contract has both current data and deep open interest.

It is taken by hand from each Friday's Baker Hughes North America Rotary Rig Count and carries the report date it came from, so you can always see which week it covers. Unlike the EIA series here it is not fetched automatically — Baker Hughes publishes it through a bot-protected dashboard — so it can briefly lag a fresh Friday release. One thing worth noting when reading it: the oil and gas split moves even when the headline total does not, because rigs shift between oil and gas targets underneath a flat number.