Oil seems like an easy thing to count once it is in storage. You see how much is in each tank and add it all up. Or take the previous week’s data then add up all the oil added and drawn from the storage tanks in a given week. Seems easy enough. Yet somehow it is not. The API (American Petroleum Institute) came out this morning and said that US storage unexpectedly levels rose by 2.2 million barrels. Day traders peed their pants and the global price of oil dropped. So later this morning the EIA (Energy Information Administration) comes out and says. Um actually there was a 2.5 million barrel draw down and US storage is now at 522 million barrels. So the two agencies were off in their counts by five million barrels. That’s a one percent margin of error. No big deal. Except that most of the oil is static. Only around 15 millions barrels moves around the US in a day. So they were off by five percent this week.
Oops.
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