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USA Crude Oil Stocks Rise More Than 3MM Barrels WoW

U.S. commercial crude oil inventories, excluding those in the Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR), increased by 3.4 million barrels from the week ending January 2 to the week ending January 9. That’s what the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) highlighted in its latest weekly petroleum status report, which was released on January 14 and included data […]

U.S. commercial crude oil inventories, excluding those in the Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR), increased by 3.4 million barrels from the week ending January 2 to the week ending January 9.

That’s what the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) highlighted in its latest weekly petroleum status report, which was released on January 14 and included data for the week ending January 9.

According to this EIA report, crude oil stocks, not including the SPR, stood at 422.4 million barrels on January 9, 419.1 million barrels on January 2, and 412.7 million barrels on January 10, 2025. The report highlighted that data may not add up to totals due to independent rounding.

Crude oil in the SPR stood at 413.7 million barrels on January 9, 413.5 million barrels on January 2, and 394.3 million barrels on January 10, 2025, the report showed. 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 1.713 billion barrels on January 9, the report revealed. Total petroleum stocks were up 6.4 million barrels week on week and up 88.1 million barrels year on year, the report pointed out.

“At 422.4 million barrels, U.S. crude oil inventories are about three percent below the five year average for this time of year,” the EIA said in its latest weekly petroleum status report.

“Total motor gasoline inventories increased by 9.0 million barrels from last week and are about four percent above the five year average for this time of year. Finished gasoline inventories decreased, while blending components inventories increased last week,” it added.

“Distillate fuel inventories slightly decreased last week and are about four percent below the five year average for this time of year. Propane/propylene inventories decreased 2.4 million barrels from last week and are about 33 percent above the five year average for this time of year,” it continued.

U.S. crude oil refinery inputs averaged 17.0 million barrels per day during the week ending January 9, according to the EIA’s report, which pointed out that this was 48,000 barrels per day more than the previous week’s average.

“Refineries operated at 95.3 percent of their operable capacity last week,” the EIA said in its report.

“Gasoline production increased last week, averaging 9.0 million barrels per day. Distillate fuel production decreased by 18,000 barrels per day last week, averaging 5.3 million barrels per day,” it added.

U.S. crude oil imports averaged 7.1 million barrels per day last week, the EIA noted in its report. It pointed out that this was an increase of 752,000 barrels per day from the previous week.

“Over the past four weeks, crude oil imports averaged about 6.1 million barrels per day, 5.7 percent less than the same four-week period last year,” the EIA stated in its latest weekly petroleum status report.

“Total motor gasoline imports (including both finished gasoline and gasoline blending components) last week averaged 448,000 barrels per day, and distillate fuel imports averaged 220,000 barrels per day,” it added.

Total products supplied over the last four-week period averaged 20.0 million barrels a day, the EIA said in its report, outlining that this was 1.1 percent below the same period last year.

“Over the past four weeks, motor gasoline product supplied averaged 8.5 million barrels a day, similar to the same period last year,” the EIA stated.

“Distillate fuel product supplied averaged 3.7 million barrels a day over the past four weeks, up by 2.2 percent from the same period last year. Jet fuel product supplied was up 4.2 percent compared with the same four-week period last year,” it added.

Analyst Take

In a Skandinaviska Enskilda Banken AB (SEB) report sent to Rigzone by the SEB team on Thursday, which analyzed the EIA’s latest weekly petroleum status report, SEB Commodities Analyst Ole R. Hvalbye noted that U.S. refinery activity “remains very strong”.

“Crude runs edged higher last week to 17.0 million barrels per day, pushing utilization up to 95.3 percent, which is high for this time of year. Gasoline output increased, while distillate (diesel) production dipped slightly, but overall refinery throughput continues to hum along,” he said in the report.

“On the flow side, crude imports jumped sharply, rising ~750,000 barrels per day to 7.1 million barrels per day. That’s a meaningful rebound WoW, even if the four-week average still sits about six percent below last year,” he added.

“Product imports were mixed, with gasoline imports on the lower side and distillates relatively elevated,” he continued.

Hvalbye went on to highlight in the report that “U.S. commercial crude stocks rose by 3.4 million barrels to 422.4 million barrels, leaving inventories still ~3 percent below the five-year average, but moving in the wrong direction for bulls”.

“The real eye-catcher was products: gasoline inventories surged by 9.0 million barrels and are now ~4 percent above seasonal norms. Diesel inventories edged slightly lower on the week, but remains only ~4 percent below average, while propane inventories fell again yet are still a massive 33 percent above normal,” he said.

“In total, commercial petroleum inventories [excluding the SPR] increased by 6.2 million barrels, confirming broad stock builds across the barrel,” he pointed out.

Hvalbye noted in the report that, “on the demand side, the picture remains soft”.

“Products supplied averaged 20.0 million barrels per day, down 1.1 percent YoY. Gasoline demand was roughly flat, diesel stronger (+2.2 percent YoY), and jet fuel continued to outperform (+4.2 percent YoY), but overall demand growth is not strong enough to prevent inventories from rising,” he said.

“Even with refineries running close to max, higher imports and soft demand continue to push stocks higher. The U.S. balance remains comfortably supplied, reinforcing the broader surplus narrative despite ongoing geopolitical noise,” Hvalbye went on to state.

To contact the author, email [email protected]

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USA Crude Oil Stocks Rise More Than 3MM Barrels WoW

U.S. commercial crude oil inventories, excluding those in the Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR), increased by 3.4 million barrels from the week ending January 2 to the week ending January 9. That’s what the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) highlighted in its latest weekly petroleum status report, which was released on January 14 and included data for the week ending January 9. According to this EIA report, crude oil stocks, not including the SPR, stood at 422.4 million barrels on January 9, 419.1 million barrels on January 2, and 412.7 million barrels on January 10, 2025. The report highlighted that data may not add up to totals due to independent rounding. Crude oil in the SPR stood at 413.7 million barrels on January 9, 413.5 million barrels on January 2, and 394.3 million barrels on January 10, 2025, the report showed. 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 1.713 billion barrels on January 9, the report revealed. Total petroleum stocks were up 6.4 million barrels week on week and up 88.1 million barrels year on year, the report pointed out. “At 422.4 million barrels, U.S. crude oil inventories are about three percent below the five year average for this time of year,” the EIA said in its latest weekly petroleum status report. “Total motor gasoline inventories increased by 9.0 million barrels from last week and are about four percent above the five year average for this time of year. Finished gasoline inventories decreased, while blending components inventories increased last week,” it added. “Distillate fuel inventories slightly decreased last week and are about four percent below the five year average for this time of year. Propane/propylene inventories decreased 2.4 million barrels from

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Can retired naval power plants solve the data center power crunch?

HGP’s plan includes a revenue share with the government, and the company would create a decommissioning fund, according to Bloomberg. The alternative? After a lengthy decommissioning process, the reactors are shipped to a remote storage facility in Washington state together dust along with dozens of other retired nuclear reactors. So the carrier itself isn’t going to be turned into a data center, but its power plants are being proposed for a data center on land. And even with the lengthening decommissioning process, that’s still faster than building a nuclear power plant from scratch. Don’t hold your breath, says Kristen Vosmaer, managing director, JLL Work Dynamics Data Center team. The idea of converting USS Nimitz’s nuclear reactors to power AI data centers sounds compelling but faces insurmountable obstacles, he argues. “Naval reactors use weapons-grade uranium that civilian entities cannot legally possess, and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has no pathway to license such facilities. Even setting aside the fuel issue, these military-designed systems would require complete reconstruction to meet civilian safety standards, eliminating any cost advantages over purpose-built nuclear plants,” Vosmaer said. The maritime concept itself, however, does have some merit, said Vosmaer. “Ocean cooling can reduce energy consumption compared to land-based data centers, and floating platforms offer positioning flexibility that fixed facilities cannot match,” Vosmaer said.

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Microsoft will invest $80B in AI data centers in fiscal 2025

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Join our daily and weekly newsletters for the latest updates and exclusive content on industry-leading AI coverage. Learn More 2025 is poised to be a pivotal year for enterprise AI. The past year has seen rapid innovation, and this year will see the same. This has made it more critical than ever to revisit your AI strategy to stay competitive and create value for your customers. From scaling AI agents to optimizing costs, here are the five critical areas enterprises should prioritize for their AI strategy this year. 1. Agents: the next generation of automation AI agents are no longer theoretical. In 2025, they’re indispensable tools for enterprises looking to streamline operations and enhance customer interactions. Unlike traditional software, agents powered by large language models (LLMs) can make nuanced decisions, navigate complex multi-step tasks, and integrate seamlessly with tools and APIs. At the start of 2024, agents were not ready for prime time, making frustrating mistakes like hallucinating URLs. They started getting better as frontier large language models themselves improved. “Let me put it this way,” said Sam Witteveen, cofounder of Red Dragon, a company that develops agents for companies, and that recently reviewed the 48 agents it built last year. “Interestingly, the ones that we built at the start of the year, a lot of those worked way better at the end of the year just because the models got better.” Witteveen shared this in the video podcast we filmed to discuss these five big trends in detail. Models are getting better and hallucinating less, and they’re also being trained to do agentic tasks. Another feature that the model providers are researching is a way to use the LLM as a judge, and as models get cheaper (something we’ll cover below), companies can use three or more models to

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

Join our daily and weekly newsletters for the latest updates and exclusive content on industry-leading AI coverage. Learn More OpenAI has taken a more aggressive approach to red teaming than its AI competitors, demonstrating its security teams’ advanced capabilities in two areas: multi-step reinforcement and external red teaming. OpenAI recently released two papers that set a new competitive standard for improving the quality, reliability and safety of AI models in these two techniques and more. The first paper, “OpenAI’s Approach to External Red Teaming for AI Models and Systems,” reports that specialized teams outside the company have proven effective in uncovering vulnerabilities that might otherwise have made it into a released model because in-house testing techniques may have missed them. In the second paper, “Diverse and Effective Red Teaming with Auto-Generated Rewards and Multi-Step Reinforcement Learning,” OpenAI introduces an automated framework that relies on iterative reinforcement learning to generate a broad spectrum of novel, wide-ranging attacks. Going all-in on red teaming pays practical, competitive dividends It’s encouraging to see competitive intensity in red teaming growing among AI companies. When Anthropic released its AI red team guidelines in June of last year, it joined AI providers including Google, Microsoft, Nvidia, OpenAI, and even the U.S.’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), which all had released red teaming frameworks. Investing heavily in red teaming yields tangible benefits for security leaders in any organization. OpenAI’s paper on external red teaming provides a detailed analysis of how the company strives to create specialized external teams that include cybersecurity and subject matter experts. The goal is to see if knowledgeable external teams can defeat models’ security perimeters and find gaps in their security, biases and controls that prompt-based testing couldn’t find. What makes OpenAI’s recent papers noteworthy is how well they define using human-in-the-middle

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