EIA Oil Preview: Refinery Outages to Drive Crude Build and Product Draws

EIA Oil Inventory Preview: The EIA weekly petroleum status report will be released at 10:30 ET (15:30 GMT) today.

• Crude inventories are expected to show a build of +3.30mbbl for the week ending Feb. 9, according to a Bloomberg survey. Recent data releases have seen large moves after cold weather in January caused production and refinery disruption. Crude inventories last week rose more than expected. Production recovered back up to record highs of 13.3mb/d while imports also gained and exports edged slightly lower on the week. Cushing stocks remain below normal, and the data again showed a large adjustment figure despite the change in methodology last year.
• Refinery utilisation is expected to remain almost unchanged in the data this week with an increase of just 0.03% according to a Bloomberg survey. The ongoing Whiting outage is likely to help limit any recovery in refinery runs. Utilisation was last week at the lowest since Dec 2022 at 82.4% with little sign of recovery amid unplanned outages heading into the maintenance period. Gulf Coast rates fell to 77.1% and the lowest seasonal level in data going back to 2010.
• Total US gasoline stocks are expected to draw by -1.76mbbl and distillates to draw by -1.90mbbl, according to a Bloomberg survey. Gasoline production last week fell amid the lower refinery runs to result in a drop in total US stocks although PADD 2 gasoline stocks rose to the highest since 2019. Distillates stocks as expected fell with a small dip in production and an increase in implied demand.
• The weekly EIA data last week showed both US gasoline and distillates implied demand saw a recovery but both moves were in line with the seasonal trend seen in the previous five years. Gasoline four week average demand remained about 2.3% below the previous five year average. Distillates demand was 9.8% below the previous five year average despite increasing from 3.38mb/d to 3.75mb/d in the previous couple of weeks. US weekly gasoline demand declined by 0.7% for the week ending 10 February to 8.321mb/d, GasBuddy data showed.
• The API data released last night showed a large crude build of +8.52mbbl, with a build of 0.5mbbl at Cushing. Gasoline inventories showed a large draw of -7.2mbbl while distillates stocks fell by -4.0mbbl.