Oil prices are lower overnight (but dramatically off their lows) amid on-again, off-again optimism of an imminent US-Iran peace deal.
Benchmark Brent fell as much as 12% to $96.75 a barrel in London, while West Texas Intermediate dropped up to 13%. European natural gas plunged as much as 14%.
Oil and gas laterpared about half of those losses after Trump said in a Truth Social post on Wednesday that if Iran doesn’t agree, “the bombing starts.”
Overnight we saw huge across the board drawdowns in US energy inventories reported by API (and a huge SPR drain). All eyes on the official data this morning...
For the second week in a row, US inventories saw significant declines across the board with products seeing the biggest draws. Crude's drawdown was a modest disappointment (especially after API's big report)...
Overall, crude stockpiles remain elevated (but are drawing down)...
Perhaps most notably, the Strategic Petroleum Reserve(SPR) is seeing massive drawdownsto support the global loss of supply from Hormuz.
On the back of that draw,Bloomberg's energy guru, Javier Blas,dropped this stunning chart showing that,on a 7-day moving average, global oil liftings (into tankers) have recovered to their pre-war level due to a surge in liftings in the Americas.Of course, that's helped by massive stock drawdowns / SPR drain, but still...
Additionally, last week sawUS crude exports actually decline(after nearing the unprecedented level of 100 million barrels in 7 days). The decline in crude cargoes headed overseas pulled down overall US oil and fuels exports from record high levels also set the week earlier,even as fuel exports rose to the highest weekly level ever.
The US has sent out at least 1.5 million barrels of diesel a day since the week of April 3.
Source: ZeroHedge News
