Prices, reserves, production, rigs, inventories, refining, breakevens, chokepoints and the currency the barrel is quoted in — 13 ledgers on the numbers that run the oil market, in plain English, in sortable tables, with the date each one was measured printed beside it.
Oil is the most consequential commodity on the planet and its statistics are scattered across a dozen institutions that publish on different schedules, in different units, with different definitions of the same word. A reader who wants the reserve figure for Iraq, the rig count for last week, and the level of the American strategic reserve currently visits three organisations and reconciles three vocabularies. This page exists so that reader does not have to.
It is built the way the Institute builds its acquisition ledgers and its franchise valuation references: as a living reference rather than an article. The tables sort. Every figure names the body that measured it. Every derived ratio is computed here from the figures shown, not carried in from somewhere else. And every number carries the date it was measured, which is not the date this page was published — a distinction that matters more in oil right now than in any other market, because almost everything is moving.
Prepared by The Baratelli Institute · publication date September 9, 2026. Every figure below carries its own measurement date, which is set by whoever measured it and is often older than this page.
Twelve headline figures, each on its own clock. Sort any column.
| Figure | Figure | Measured | Source | What it carries |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Global oil supply | 101.5 mb/d | July 2026 | IEA Oil Market Report, published August 12, 2026 | Rose 2.4 mb/d on the month and sat 6.3 mb/d below July 2025. |
| OPEC+ effective spare capacity | 1.09 mb/d | July 2026 | IEA Oil Market Report, published August 12, 2026 | 1.07% of world supply. The OPEC-8 subset holds 0.07 mb/d. |
| Gulf production shut in | 8.3 mb/d | July 2026 | IEA Oil Market Report, published August 12, 2026 | The largest supply disruption since the 1970s. |
| World proven reserves | 1,572.459 bn bbl | year-end 2025 | OPEC Annual Statistical Bulletin 2026, Table 3.1 (published 2026) | 42.4 years of reserve life at July 2026 supply, computed on this page. |
| United States rigs drilling | 588 rigs | week ended September 4, 2026 | Baker Hughes North America Rig Count | 449 drilling for oil, 130 for gas, 9 other. |
| United States commercial crude stocks | 424.5 mn bbl | week ended August 28, 2026 | EIA Weekly Petroleum Status Report | About 1% above the five-year average for the week. Excludes the strategic reserve. |
| United States Strategic Petroleum Reserve | 285.4 mn bbl | as reported September 8, 2026 | Reuters / BOE Report | 39.3% of the 727 mn bbl authorised capacity. Lowest since November 1982. |
| Global observed oil stocks | just under 7,900 mn bbl | end-July 2026 | IEA Oil Market Report, published August 12, 2026 | Down 410 mn bbl since end-February, a 2.7 mb/d average draw. |
| Brent crude | $96.85 / bbl | opening quote, September 8, 2026 | Published daily quote | Reached $126 on April 30, 2026, a four-year high. |
| WTI crude | $92.69 / bbl | opening quote, September 8, 2026 | Published daily quote | Posted a 35% weekly gain in early March, the largest since 1983. |
| Global refinery throughput | 80.9 mb/d | July 2026 | IEA Oil Market Report, published August 12, 2026 | Roughly 78% of world capacity, with Atlantic Basin margins at record highs. |
| United States crude production | 13.6 mb/d | calendar year 2025 | EIA | A record, and the highest annual output any country has produced. |
Read the Measured column before quoting anything from this table. Three of these figures are weekly, five are monthly, two are annual, one is a daily quote, and one — world proven reserves — is a year-end 2025 figure published in 2026 and describing a stock that is revised once a year. Quoting them against one another without regard to their dates is the single most common error in energy commentary, and in a period when supply has moved by several million barrels a day inside a quarter it is not a small error.
Each one is a standing page that gets refreshed, not an article that goes stale. The bar at the top of every page reaches all of them from anywhere in the reference.
Where every cent of a $4.48 gallon goes — crude, refining, distribution and tax — with each of the four components on its own clock and three of the four defined differently from how a reader assumes.
Open the ledger →LedgerSeventy-six years of crude prices deflated to constant July 2026 dollars. The 2008 records are still records in real terms and today's are not close.
Open the ledger →LedgerOne central bank, one date, one fixing time. A dollar barrel converted into 29 currencies without mixing thirty sources and thirty clocks.
Open the ledger →LedgerWhat the shape of the curve does to inventory and why it drives storage behaviour rather than describing it — then the full strip: 63 listed WTI months from the exchange's own Daily Bulletin, $91.48 front against $72.02 a year out, $19.46 of backwardation, open interest printed beside every settlement.
Open the ledger →LedgerTwo entirely different questions that share one word. The price a well needs and the price a treasury needs, kept rigorously apart — with the gaps in each named.
Open the ledger →LedgerAll 41 countries the OPEC bulletin itemises, ranked, with share of world total and reserve life computed two ways. Venezuela first at 303.701 billion barrels; the United States ninth with a reserve life of 8.4 years.
Open the ledger →LedgerEvery OPEC+ member's output for July 2026 against its implied target and its sustainable capacity. Effective spare capacity is 1.09 mb/d, or 1.07% of a 101.5 mb/d market.
Open the ledger →LedgerThe seven countries that hold the voluntary cuts — not eight, and not the full membership — their August and September 2026 decisions, and why quota discipline is currently the wrong lens.
Open the ledger →Ledger588 rigs turning in the United States, 449 drilling for oil, 1,907 worldwide. A forty per cent move in price has produced a 1.4 per cent move in the American count.
Open the ledger →LedgerCapacity measured on two clocks five months apart, crack spreads computed from same-week legs in both units the market quotes, and the one undated figure on this reference, labelled as such.
Open the ledger →LedgerDiesel at $5.967 a gallon, a nominal record and not a real one. Why distillate is tighter than gasoline, and why distillate fuel oil is not diesel.
Open the ledger →LedgerCommercial crude one per cent above its five-year average in the same week the Strategic Petroleum Reserve reads 39.3% of capacity and its lowest since November 1982. The two facts are causally linked.
Open the ledger →LedgerEight passages, six years of flows each, and bypass capacity that covers under a quarter of Hormuz. Plus what the industry itself expected in April, measured, and how wrong it was.
Open the ledger →The reference is organised in four families. Price and cost answers what a barrel costs and what that means at a pump, in constant dollars, in another currency, and in a later month. Supply and cost answers who holds the oil, who is producing it, what it costs them to produce, and whether anyone is drilling for more. Downstream answers what happens to the barrel after it is bought. Movement answers whether it can get to where it was sold. Almost every misreading of this market comes from answering a question in one family with a number from another.
Taken one at a time these series are a reference. Taken together they describe a single condition, and the Institute's reading of it is below. Each claim links to the ledger that carries the figures behind it.
The market has lost its shock absorber. Effective spare capacity across all of OPEC+ is 1.09 mb/d against world supply of 101.5 mb/d — 1.07%. The subset of countries that manages the voluntary cuts holds 0.07 mb/d between them, and there are 7 of them, not eight: the International Energy Agency still labels the group “OPEC-8” in its August 2026 report, while OPEC's own August and September 2026 releases name Saudi Arabia, Russia, Iraq, Kuwait, Kazakhstan, Algeria and Oman and no longer name the United Arab Emirates. The quota ledger carries both labels rather than choosing between them. For most of the last twenty years the equivalent figure ran between two and four million barrels a day. When cover is three million barrels, an outage is a logistics problem and someone opens a valve. When it is one, the only remaining adjustment mechanism is demand, and demand adjusts through price. See the production ledger.
Reserves and the ability to produce them have come apart. Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq and Kuwait hold 45.6% of the world's proven reserves and in July 2026 produced 15.49 mb/d against 23.66 mb/d of sustainable capacity — a gap of 8.17 mb/d. That figure was built from four country rows and it lands within a rounding error of the 8.3 mb/d of shut-in Gulf output stated independently from the top down. A reserve ranking now tells a reader who owns the oil and nothing about who can ship it this quarter. See the reserves ledger.
American drilling did not respond, and that retires a decade-old assumption. The rig count went from 580 to 588 across roughly eight weeks at a crude price near a four-year high, and did not move at all in the most recent two. The belief that shale would cap any spike rested on a response time of two to three quarters; this disruption has run since March, and the count has moved by 8. What the last decade built was a supply source with a fast financial response and a slow physical one. See the rig ledger.
The most-watched inventory number is currently the least informative. United States commercial crude reads about one per cent above its five-year average because 172 million barrels of strategic reserve were released into it. The comfortable number is comfortable because the uncomfortable one paid for it, and during a release the two series are not independent. See the inventory ledger.
The constraint is upstream and in transit, not in the plants. Atlantic Basin refining margins set all-time records in July and August at global refinery utilisation of roughly 78%. Refiners earning record margins while running well below capacity is the signature of crude failing to arrive, and July's global stock draw was almost entirely oil on water rather than oil on land. Building refineries does not address this.
| Benchmark | Figure | Measured | Source | What it carries |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Brent (North Sea Dated) | $96.85 / bbl | opening quote, September 8, 2026 | Forbes Advisor daily crude quote | Brent is the seaborne light-sweet benchmark most of the world prices against. |
| WTI (West Texas Intermediate) | $92.69 / bbl | opening quote, September 8, 2026 | Forbes Advisor daily crude quote | WTI is priced at Cushing, Oklahoma, inland. Its spread to Brent is a shipping and access number, not a quality number. |
| Brent, end-July 2026 | $96.80 / bbl | July 31, 2026 | IEA Oil Market Report, published August 12, 2026 | Rose $25.67 over the month of July and traded a range of nearly $40 inside it. |
| Brent, intra-month peak | $105 / bbl | July 23, 2026 | IEA Oil Market Report, published August 12, 2026 | Reached on the breakdown of the mid-June ceasefire. |
| Brent, 2026 high | $126 / bbl | April 30, 2026 | CNBC, April 30, 2026 | A four-year high, reached during the blockade escalation. |
A price is the fastest-moving figure on this page and the one most quickly stale. The two opening quotes above were accurate at the moment stated and should be treated as historical the following day; they are included to fix the level, not to serve as a live feed. The dated highs are the more durable entries. West Texas Intermediate traded above Brent by the widest margin since 2009 during this episode, which inverts the normal relationship: when seaborne transit is disrupted, an inland benchmark can command a premium over a seaborne one.
| Series | Figure | Measured | Source | What it carries |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Global oil supply | 101.5 mb/d | July 2026 | IEA Oil Market Report, published August 12, 2026 | Rose 2.4 mb/d on the month but sat 6.3 mb/d below July 2025. |
| Gulf production shut in | 8.3 mb/d | July 2026 | IEA Oil Market Report, published August 12, 2026 | Gulf output was 23.9 mb/d in July against pre-war levels 8.3 mb/d higher. |
| OPEC+ effective spare capacity | 1.09 mb/d | against July 2026 supply | IEA Oil Market Report, published August 12, 2026 | Reachable within 90 days and sustainable. Excludes shut-in Iranian and Russian crude. The OPEC-8 subset is 0.07 mb/d. |
| Global oil demand, 2026 | declining 1.6 mb/d | 2026 full-year forecast, made August 2026 | IEA Oil Market Report, published August 12, 2026 | A forecast, not an observation. Contracting 4.9 mb/d in 2Q26 and 2.8 mb/d in 3Q26, returning to growth of 580 kb/d in 4Q26. |
| Global oil supply, 2026 | declining 4.3 mb/d to 102 mb/d | 2026 full-year forecast, made August 2026 | IEA Oil Market Report, published August 12, 2026 | A forecast. The IEA expects a rebound of 8.3 mb/d in 2027 to 110.3 mb/d. |
| 3Q26 balance | deficit of 1.8 mb/d | 3Q26 estimate, made August 2026 | IEA Oil Market Report, published August 12, 2026 | More than double the roughly 800 kb/d estimated a month earlier. |
Three of these rows are forecasts and say so. A forecast made in August 2026 about calendar 2026 is a different kind of statement from an observation of July 2026, and the Institute does not print them in the same voice. The demand rows in particular are worth reading carefully: demand is not measured, it is inferred from supply and stock changes, and in a period of large stock movements the inference carries the error.
| Series | Figure | Measured | Source | What it carries |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Global refinery crude throughput | 80.9 mb/d | July 2026 | IEA Oil Market Report, published August 12, 2026 | Up 1.8 mb/d on the month and still nearly 5 mb/d below July 2025. |
| Global refining capacity | about 103.3 mb/d | 2026, across 650+ refineries | Industry compilation | A capacity figure, not a throughput figure. Asia-Pacific holds roughly 36%. |
| US operable atmospheric distillation capacity | 18.2 mb/cd | January 1, 2026 | EIA Refinery Capacity Report | Down more than 250,000 b/cd, about 1%, from January 1, 2025. |
| US operable refineries | 131 | early 2026 | EIA Refinery Capacity Report | Down from 132 at the start of 2024 and 2025. |
| Atlantic Basin refining margins | all-time highs | July and August 2026 | IEA Oil Market Report, published August 12, 2026 | Diesel, jet fuel and gasoline cracks all surged. New records set in Europe in August. |
| Seaborne product trade | down 3.8 mb/d year over year | July 2026 | IEA Oil Market Report, published August 12, 2026 | Diesel exports from Russia, the Middle East and Asia fell 1.3 mb/d, about 20% of global seaborne trade. Jet fuel from those regions fell about 670 kb/d, about 34%. |
Refining capacity and refinery throughput are different quantities and are routinely conflated. Capacity is what the plants could process; throughput is what they did process. The ratio between them — roughly 78% in July 2026 — is the number that matters, and it is computed on this page from the two figures above rather than quoted. It is quoted to the whole per cent for a reason: It is an industry compilation, not a figure the Institute has traced to a dated primary publication, and global refinery utilisation is computed against it. The numerator — July 2026 throughput — is dated and primary. The denominator is not. Every utilisation figure quoted on this reference therefore carries a dated top and an undated bottom, and that is why it is quoted to the nearest whole percentage point and never to a decimal. The refining ledger carries the capacity clocks, the American plant count, and the crack spreads that say what a refiner earns per barrel.
There are always two clocks running on a figure. The publication clock is when the page was prepared, and it covers the whole document. The measurement clock is when the figure itself was measured, by whoever measured it — and it is set by the source, not by the author.
A date at the top of a page does not protect a figure whose own measurement date is older. That is the failure that document dating misses entirely, and it is why every table here carries a Measured column instead of a single date in the footer.
In oil the highest-risk categories are: reserve figures, which are annual, self-reported and published months after the year they describe; sustainable capacity, which is a standing judgement with no monthly date of its own; any figure carried forward from an earlier piece; and any price older than a day. The reserve total on this page describes year-end 2025 and was published in 2026. The capacity figures behind the spare-capacity ratio may predate the damage that made them unreachable. Both are stated, and neither is smoothed over.
One practical example from building this page. The publicly posted current summary of the American weekly petroleum status report was found to be serving a frozen copy from a week in December 2025 — fourteen weeks stale relative to the live series, at a URL that presents itself as current. Nothing on the file said so. A reader who trusted the URL rather than the date inside the document would have published a fourteen-week-old inventory figure as this week's. The rule caught it, which is what the rule is for.
Every term used across the 13 ledgers, defined once. Sortable.
| Term | What it means, plainly |
|---|---|
| Barrel (bbl) | 42 United States gallons, or about 159 litres. The unit survives from the wooden barrels of the 1860s Pennsylvania fields and has no physical justification beyond custom. |
| mb/d | Million barrels per day, the standard flow unit. The world produced roughly 101.5 of them in July 2026. Some sources write kb/d for thousand barrels per day; 1,000 kb/d is 1 mb/d. |
| b/cd | Barrels per calendar day, used for refinery capacity. It differs from barrels per stream day because no refinery runs 365 days a year, and quoting one where the other is meant overstates capacity by several per cent. |
| Proven reserves | The volume a country's reporting says is recoverable under existing economic and operating conditions. A bookkeeping category, not a geological one: it rises when prices rise, with no new discovery required. Mostly self-reported and not independently audited. |
| Reserve life, or the R/P ratio | Proven reserves divided by one year's production. A units conversion that answers how many years the current reserve base would last at the current rate. No country produces at a flat rate to its last barrel, so it is a scale indicator and never a forecast. |
| Sustainable production capacity | The maximum output the International Energy Agency judges a country could reach within ninety days and hold for an extended period. A judgement rather than a measurement, and it carries no monthly date of its own. |
| Effective spare capacity | Sustainable capacity that is also actually available — so it excludes crude shut in by damage or sanction. This is the number that determines whether an outage is a logistics problem or a price problem, and in July 2026 it was 1.09 mb/d. |
| OPEC and OPEC+ | OPEC is the twelve-member organisation itself. OPEC+ adds non-member producers, most significantly Russia and Kazakhstan, that coordinate on output. Nearly all production management now happens at the OPEC+ level, and the OPEC-8 is the subset holding the current voluntary cuts. |
| Brent and WTI | The two dominant crude benchmarks. Brent is a seaborne North Sea light sweet grade that most of the world prices against; West Texas Intermediate is priced inland at Cushing, Oklahoma. The spread between them is mostly a shipping and access number, not a quality one, and it inverts when transit is disrupted. |
| Commercial inventories | Crude and product held by companies for operating and trading purposes. Reported weekly in the United States and compared against a five-year average for the same week of the year, which is how seasonality is removed. |
| Strategic Petroleum Reserve | Government-owned crude held in salt-dome caverns on the United States Gulf Coast for release during a supply emergency. Authorised storage capacity is 727 million barrels. A release is sold to refiners, so it moves into commercial inventories rather than disappearing. |
| Oil on water | Floating inventory: cargoes at sea, in transit, or waiting to discharge. It is counted in global observed stocks, and a fall concentrated in this pool points to a constraint on movement rather than on production or storage. |
| Observed stocks | Inventory in locations that report their levels. A large share of world inventory sits in locations that do not — China's strategic stockpile most consequentially — so a change in observed stocks is a change in the observed part and not a census. |
| Crack spread | The margin between the price of crude and the prices of the products refined from it. Record cracks with refineries running below capacity indicate a shortage of crude arriving, not a shortage of capacity to process it. |
| Refinery utilisation | Throughput divided by capacity. It is not a measure of how hard refiners are trying; a plant with no crude to run reports low utilisation and high margins at the same time. |
| Rig count | The number of rotary rigs actively drilling, counted by Baker Hughes weekly in North America and monthly worldwide. It is a current measurement of a future quantity: a rig turning today is a well producing in six to nine months. |
| Contango and backwardation | The shape of the futures curve. In contango later months cost more than the front month, which pays traders to store oil; in backwardation the front month costs more, which pays them to sell inventory. The shape therefore drives stock behaviour and is not merely a description of it. |
| Measurement date | The Institute's own convention, applied on every page here: the date a figure was measured, by whoever measured it, as distinct from the date the page was published. A page dated today can carry a figure measured fourteen months ago, and only the measurement date reveals it. |
Provenance. Reserve figures are transcribed from the OPEC Annual Statistical Bulletin; production, spare-capacity, stock and refining figures from the International Energy Agency Oil Market Report; United States production, refinery capacity and inventory figures from the Energy Information Administration; rig counts from the Baker Hughes North America and Worldwide rig counts; benchmark prices from published daily quotes. Each row names its source and the date the figure was measured. Where a figure was not published, or where a published series does not itemise a country, the cell reads n/d rather than carrying a fabricated estimate. Derived quantities — reserve life, shares of world total, capacity utilisation, spare capacity as a share of supply — are computed from the figures shown and are not separately sourced; they inherit the measurement dates of their inputs, and where the two inputs run on different clocks the page says so. The Baratelli Institute is a publisher operating under the Lowe v. SEC publisher exception. Nothing here is investment advice, a recommendation, or an offer to buy or sell any security or commodity. Figures change; verify against the primary source before relying on any of them.