What's Up With Diesel and Gasoline

The election might be over, but the vote counting, and arguing will continue... until the next election. In the meantime, energy prices will continue to hit the consumer pocketbook, with little to no relief in sight. [Data derived from EIA.GOV]

So, a review of a chart, I have published since August, 2006.

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Crude inventories are up 3.9M Barrels from last week, with Gasoline down 500K and distillates down 900K. Clearly there is enough Crude, but refiners are working at a fairly high rate... to export 3.5M barrels of gasoline more than imports, over the previous week. Same for distillates, with 7.8M barrels exported over imports.

I keep hearing about demand destruction in gasoline, and yes, it is much lower than one year ago. 

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However, based on a 12 year timeline... hard to discern.

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I would suggest that consumers are more mindful of gasoline prices and consumption, but are also being hammered by various other categories, such as food, which is not slowing in the upward trajectory and then there is the "core". You have to go back a number of years to see that core at current levels.

Now to the Northeast and distillate stocks...

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Not much in the way of improvement and actually a bit of slippage. It is not unusual to see the inventory this low in New England, at the tail end of the heating season, but never this low, at this time of season... dating back to records of November, 1990.