Conclusion: The weekly DOE statistics are still heavily impacted by the aftermath of hurricane Harvey in this weeks stats and will remain impacted for a few weeks. The numbers look very bullish at first sight, but part of the large draw in total stocks is due to low net imports, which will likely recover going forward. We still expect global draws to continue for the remainder of the year, leading to stronger time-spreads and flat price.
- Total petroleum draw of 8.2mb vs. seasonal build of 5mb. Large build in crude offset by large draws in products, which was to be expected as a large share of refinery capacity was still offline
- The draw in total petroleum stocks was also inflated due to a large draw in propane and other (the latter contains NLGs such as ethane)
- Implied demand recovered further but the 4wk average demand is still a lot lower than over the previous weeks. However, as we have outlined before, implied demand numbers are very unreliable at this point
- Net imports declined sharply as exports recovered to pre-storm levels while imports were still significantly lower. We expect imports to increase over the coming weeks as crude waiting offshore comes in.
- Refinery utilization recovered 5.5% w-o-w a but significant share refinery capacity was still offline last week
- Crude output recovered 150kb/d and is now back to +1mb/d y-o-y. As we have outlined before, we believe the weekly production data is overstated and y-o-y growth is likely significantly lower.
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