Strategists See USA Crude Inventories Dropping Week on Week

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Strategists See USA Crude Inventories Dropping Week on Week

Macquarie strategists, including Walt Chancellor, revealed in a report sent to Rigzone late Monday by the Macquarie team that they are forecasting that U.S. crude inventories will be down by 7.0 million barrels for the week ending December 5. “This follows a 0.6 million barrel build in the prior week, with the crude balance again […]

“This follows a 0.6 million barrel build in the prior week, with the crude balance again realizing tight relative to our expectations,” the strategists said in the report.

“For this week’s balance, from refineries, we model a minor increase in crude runs. Among net imports, we model a large reduction, with exports up modestly (+0.3 million barrels per day) and imports meaningfully lower (-0.6 million barrels per day) on a nominal basis,” they added.

The strategists warned in the report that timing of cargoes remains a source of potential volatility in this week’s crude balance.

They went on to state that, “from implied domestic supply (prod.+adj. +transfers)”, they “look for a small decrease (-0.1 million barrels per day) on a nominal basis this week”.

“Rounding out the picture, we anticipate another small increase (+0.2 million barrels) in SPR [Strategic Petroleum Reserve] stocks this week,” they added.

The Macquarie strategists also noted in the report that, “among products”, they “again look for across the board builds (gasoline/ distillate/jet +4.5/+3.9/+0.9 million barrels)”.

“Amidst holiday/seasonal/other effects we see potential for volatility in these figures this week,” they warned.

“We model implied demand for these three products at ~13.7 million barrels per day for the week ending December 5,” the strategists continued.

In its latest weekly petroleum status report at the time of writing, which was released on December 3 and included data for the week ending November 28, the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) highlighted that U.S. commercial crude oil inventories, excluding those in the SPR, increased by 0.6 million barrels from the week ending November 21 to the week ending November 28.

That EIA report showed that crude oil stocks, not including the SPR, stood at 427.5 million barrels on November 28, 426.9 million barrels on November 21, and 423.4 million barrels on November 29, 2024. Crude oil in the SPR stood at 411.7 million barrels on November 28, 411.4 million barrels on November 21, and 391.8 million barrels on November 29, 2024, the report highlighted.

Total petroleum stocks – including crude oil, total motor gasoline, fuel ethanol, kerosene type jet fuel, distillate fuel oil, residual fuel oil, propane/propylene, and other oils – stood at 1.687 billion barrels on November 28, the report showed. Total petroleum stocks were up 5.5 million barrels week on week and up 58.5 million barrels year on year, the EIA report showed.

In a Skandinaviska Enskilda Banken AB (SEB) report sent to Rigzone on December 4, which focused on the EIA’s latest weekly petroleum status report at the time of writing, Ole R. Hvalbye, a commodities analyst at the company, noted that “overall”, the EIA report “reinforces a well-supplied U.S. balance”.

“Very strong refinery runs, broad product builds, and slow demand continue to push inventories higher as we have entered December,” he added.

In an oil and gas report sent to Rigzone by the Macquarie team on December 1, Macquarie strategists, including Walt Chancellor, revealed that they were forecasting that U.S. crude inventories would be up 3.3 million barrels for the week ending November 28.

“This follows a 2.8 million barrel build in the prior week, with the crude balance realizing tight relative to our expectations,” the strategists said in that report.

The EIA’s next weekly petroleum status report is scheduled to be released on December 10. It will include data for the week ending December 5. This report is described on the EIA’s website as “the petroleum supply situation in the context of historical information and selected prices”.

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EIA: US crude inventories up 600,000 bbl

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@import url(‘https://fonts.googleapis.com/css2?family=Inter:[email protected]&display=swap’); a { color: var(–color-primary-main); } .ebm-page__main h1, .ebm-page__main h2, .ebm-page__main h3, .ebm-page__main h4, .ebm-page__main h5, .ebm-page__main h6 { font-family: Inter; } body { line-height: 150%; letter-spacing: 0.025em; font-family: Inter; } button, .ebm-button-wrapper { font-family: Inter; } .label-style { text-transform: uppercase; color: var(–color-grey); font-weight: 600; font-size: 0.75rem; } .caption-style { font-size: 0.75rem; opacity: .6; } #onetrust-pc-sdk [id*=btn-handler], #onetrust-pc-sdk [class*=btn-handler] { background-color: #c19a06 !important; border-color: #c19a06 !important; } #onetrust-policy a, #onetrust-pc-sdk a, #ot-pc-content a { color: #c19a06 !important; } #onetrust-consent-sdk #onetrust-pc-sdk .ot-active-menu { border-color: #c19a06 !important; } #onetrust-consent-sdk #onetrust-accept-btn-handler, #onetrust-banner-sdk #onetrust-reject-all-handler, #onetrust-consent-sdk #onetrust-pc-btn-handler.cookie-setting-link { background-color: #c19a06 !important; border-color: #c19a06 !important; } #onetrust-consent-sdk .onetrust-pc-btn-handler { color: #c19a06 !important; border-color: #c19a06 !important; } CNOOC Ltd. started production at the Weizhou 11-4 Oilfield Adjustment and Satellite Fields Development Project in Beibu Gulf basin of the South China Sea. The project is in an average water depth of about 43 m and adopted a coordinated development plan with three offshore processing centers and one onshore terminal. Main production comes from a newly built unmanned wellhead platform and a central processing platform which are connected to an existing platform through a trestle bridge. Thirty-five development wells are planned to be commissioned, including 28 production wells and 7 water injection wells. The project is expected to achieve a plateau production of about 16,900 boe/d in 2026. The oil property is light crude. CNOOC is operator of the project with 100% interest.

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What does Arm need to do to gain enterprise acceptance?

But in 2017, AMD released the Zen architecture, which was equal if not superior to the Intel architecture. Zen made AMD competitive, and it fueled an explosive rebirth for a company that was near death a few years prior. AMD now has about 30% market share, while Intel suffers from a loss of technology as well as corporate leadership. Now, customers have a choice of Intel or AMD, and they don’t have to worry about porting their applications to a new platform like they would have to do if they switched to Arm. Analysts weigh in on Arm Tim Crawford sees no demand for Arm in the data center. Crawford is president of AVOA, a CIO consultancy. In his role, he talks to IT professionals all the time, but he’s not hearing much interest in Arm. “I don’t see Arm really making a dent, ever, into the general-purpose processor space,” Crawford said. “I think the opportunity for Arm is special applications and special silicon. If you look at the major cloud providers, their custom silicon is specifically built to do training or optimized to do inference. Arm is kind of in the same situation in the sense that it has to be optimized.” “The problem [for Arm] is that there’s not necessarily a need to fulfill at this point in time,” said Rob Enderle, principal analyst with The Enderle Group. “Obviously, there’s always room for other solutions, but Arm is still going to face the challenge of software compatibility.” And therein lies what may be Arm’s greatest challenge: software compatibility. Software doesn’t care (usually) if it’s on Intel or AMD, because both use the x86 architecture, with some differences in extensions. But Arm is a whole new platform, and that requires porting and testing. Enterprises generally don’t like disruption —

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When Schneider Electric emerged from its 2025 North American Innovation Summit in Las Vegas last week with nearly $2.3 billion in fresh U.S. data center commitments, it didn’t just notch a big sales win. It arguably put a stake in the ground about who controls the AI power-and-cooling stack over the rest of this decade. Within a single news cycle, Schneider announced: Together, the deals total about $2.27 billion in U.S. data center infrastructure, a number Schneider confirmed in background with multiple outlets and which Reuters highlighted as a bellwether for AI-driven demand. For the AI data center ecosystem, these contracts function like early-stage fuel supply deals for the power and cooling systems that underpin the “AI factory.” Supply Capacity Agreements: Locking in the AI Supply Chain Significantly, both deals are structured as supply capacity agreements, not traditional one-off equipment purchase orders. Under the SCA model, Schneider is committing dedicated manufacturing lines and inventory to these customers, guaranteeing output of power and cooling systems over a multi-year horizon. In return, Switch and Digital Realty are providing Schneider with forecastable volume and visibility at the scale of gigawatt-class campus build-outs. A Schneider spokesperson told Reuters that the two contracts are phased across 2025 and 2026, underscoring that this arrangement is about pipeline, as opposed to a one-time backlog spike. That structure does three important things for the market: Signals confidence that AI demand is durable.You don’t ring-fence billions of dollars of factory output for two customers unless you’re highly confident the AI load curve runs beyond the current GPU cycle. Pre-allocates power & cooling the way the industry pre-allocated GPUs.Hyperscalers and neoclouds have already spent two years locking up Nvidia and AMD capacity. These SCAs suggest power trains and thermal systems are joining chips on the list of constrained strategic resources.

The Data Center Power Squeeze: Mapping the Real Limits of AI-Scale Growth

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OpenAI’s red teaming innovations define new essentials for security leaders in the AI era

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