Where did all the oil go? According to the latest estimates, the world should still be awash in oil stockpiles built up during the pandemic. But that’s not what the actual data on oil supplies show, reports the Sydney Morning Herald.
World’s oil stockpiles higher
The International Energy Agency’s latest report, shows that, if their supply-and-demand numbers are right, the world’s oil stockpiles are about 660 million barrels higher than they were before the pandemic — that’s equivalent to more than a month’s worth of production by Saudi Arabia and Russia, the two biggest members of OPEC+.
Yet oil inventories in the nations of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development — including both commercial and government-controlled (strategic) stockpiles — ended 2021 almost 220 million barrels lower than they were two years earlier. Adding in other things that can be measured with varying degrees of accuracy — such as the volume of oil on tankers and stockpiles in floating-roof tanks in other parts of the world — reduces the gap between theoretical and observed inventories to about 200 million barrels.
That discrepancy is only enough to meet the entire world’s oil needs for two days, or to power the US for a week and a half.
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Source: The Sydney Morning Herald
