United States commercial crude sits about one per cent above its five-year average. In the same country, in the same week, the Strategic Petroleum Reserve reads its lowest since November 1982. Both are true and they are measuring different things.
Inventories are the only oil series that records what actually happened rather than what someone estimates is happening. Production is surveyed, demand is modelled, capacity is judged — but a tank either holds the barrels or it does not. That makes stock data the closest thing the market has to a ledger, and it is why a reader who checks one number a week should check this one.
It is also the series most easily misread, because there are at least three of them and they do not agree. This page carries all three side by side rather than choosing one.
Prepared by The Baratelli Institute · publication date September 10, 2026. Every figure below carries its own measurement date, which is set by whoever measured it and is often older than this page.
The three stock series that matter, each with the date it was measured and the body that measured it.
| Series | Figure | Measured | Source | What it carries |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| US commercial crude oil stocks | 424.5 million bbl | week ended August 28, 2026 | EIA Weekly Petroleum Status Report, published September 2, 2026 | Drew 4.5 million on the week, from 428.9 million in the week ended August 21, and sits about 1% above the five-year average for the time of year. Excludes the SPR. |
| US Strategic Petroleum Reserve | 285.4 million bbl | as reported September 8, 2026 | Reuters / BOE Report, September 8, 2026 | Down 1.2 million on the week. The lowest level since November 1982. |
| US Strategic Petroleum Reserve | 286.6 million bbl | week ended August 28, 2026 | EIA Weekly Petroleum Status Report, published September 2, 2026 | Drew 3.1 million on the week and ran 118.1 million, or 29.2%, below the year-ago level of 404.7 million. |
| Global observed oil stocks | just under 7,900 million bbl | end-July 2026 | IEA Oil Market Report, published August 12, 2026 | Fell 69 million in July, almost entirely oil on water. The first reading below 7.9 billion since April 2025. |
| Cumulative global stock draw | 410 million bbl | end-February to end-July 2026 | IEA Oil Market Report, published August 12, 2026 | An average draw of 2.7 mb/d across five months. |
Two Strategic Petroleum Reserve rows appear, on two different clocks, and the difference between them is the point. The 286.6 million barrel figure is the last official weekly reading the Energy Information Administration has published. The 285.4 million barrel figure is more recent and comes from press reporting rather than from the official weekly. The Institute prints both with their dates rather than substituting the newer for the older, because they are not the same kind of number: one is an official statistical release and one is a report of one. A reader who needs the authoritative figure should use the first; a reader who needs the current figure should use the second and know what it is.
The official weekly release for the week ended September 4, 2026 was pushed to Thursday, September 10 because of the federal closure on September 7. As of this page's publication date, therefore, the newest official reading is older than the newest reported one. That is a temporary condition and it will resolve on the next release, but while it holds it is exactly the situation in which a reader assumes the two numbers conflict when in fact they are consecutive.
Here is the reading a careful analyst gets from the standard indicator. United States commercial crude oil stocks stood at 424.5 million barrels in the week ended August 28, 2026, about one per cent above the five-year average for that week of the year. That is the number quoted on financial television, the number that moves the front-month contract on Wednesday mornings, and the number a screen reports when someone asks whether American crude supply is tight. It says supply is comfortable.
Here is what the same country's other tank shows. The Strategic Petroleum Reserve holds 285.4 million barrels, which is 39.3% of its 727 million barrel authorised storage capacity and the lowest level since November 1982 — before the majority of people now trading oil were born. It got there because 172 million barrels were authorised for release in March 2026, inside a 400 million barrel collective action by member countries of the International Energy Agency, the sixth and largest in that agency's history.
Those two facts are not in tension. They are causally linked, and the direction of the link is the finding: commercial crude looks normal because the strategic reserve was emptied into it. A government release does not vanish. It is sold to refiners, and it lands in commercial tanks, where it is counted as commercial inventory. The comfortable number is comfortable because the uncomfortable number paid for it.
This is a case of instrument blindness, and the Institute has documented the pattern elsewhere: a published series continues to read normally while the thing it was built to measure has changed underneath it. The commercial crude number is not wrong. It is answering the question it was designed to answer — how much crude is in commercial storage — and it is answering it accurately. It was never designed to answer the question a reader is actually asking, which is whether the country has cover.
Read the two together and the position is this. Total United States crude in storage, commercial and strategic combined, is 709.9 million barrels. The strategic share of it is 40.2%. When the authorised release completes, government stocks are expected to reach roughly 243 million barrels. At that point the release itself is no longer available as a tool, and the commercial number will have to stand on its own for the first time since March 2026.
Our reading is that the commercial-crude release should not be quoted as an indicator of American supply security for as long as a strategic release is running through it. During a release the two series are not independent, and the more visible one is the less informative one.
A chronology rather than a series, because the level is a consequence of decisions and the decisions have dates.
| Date | Event | Source |
|---|---|---|
| March 11, 2026 | Presidential directive authorises the release of 172 million barrels from the SPR over roughly 120 days, during the disruption of flows through the Strait of Hormuz. | Reported by Reuters and the Department of Energy |
| March 2026 | The release is coordinated inside a 400 million barrel collective action by IEA member countries — the sixth, and the largest, in the agency's history. | IEA |
| August 10, 2026 | SPR volumes fall below 300 million barrels, described at the time as the lowest since 1983. | CNBC, August 10, 2026 |
| September 8, 2026 | SPR reported at 285.4 million barrels, the lowest since November 1982. | Reuters / BOE Report |
| Expected at completion | US government stocks are expected to reach roughly 243 million barrels when the authorised release finishes. | Reported estimate |
The reserve's authorised storage capacity is 727 million barrels. Physical capacity and authorised capacity are not identical and the distinction matters when the reserve is refilled: drawing a salt-dome cavern down and filling it again degrades it, so a reserve that has been emptied cannot simply be refilled to its former level on the former schedule. The cost and the timetable of any refill are policy questions this page does not attempt to answer. The level, and how it got there, are matters of record and are above.
Where the two American series can be read against each other, the global series cannot be read two ways. Observed oil stocks worldwide stood at just under 7,900 million barrels at the end of July 2026, down 69 million on the month and the first reading below 7.9 billion barrels since April 2025. Between the end of February and the end of July, global observed stocks fell 410 million barrels — an average draw of 2.7 mb/d sustained across five months.
Almost all of July's decline was in oil on water rather than on land, which is a specific and revealing detail. Oil on water is the floating inventory in transit: cargoes at sea, in transit or waiting to discharge. When that pool drains while onshore tanks hold, the constraint is not storage and not production. It is movement. That is consistent with the refining picture, where Atlantic Basin margins reached all-time highs at global refinery utilisation of roughly 78% — plants earning record margins while running well below capacity, which is the signature of a shortage of crude arriving rather than a shortage of capacity to process it.
Weekly United States figures are measured on a Friday and published the following Wednesday. Global observed stocks are monthly, published with a lag of roughly six weeks, and revised. Comparing a weekly American reading against a monthly global one therefore compares a three-week-old measurement against a six-week-old one, and any inference about the direction of the last month rests on the older of the two.
The word observed is doing real work in the global figure. It counts stocks in locations that report, and a large share of world inventory sits in locations that do not — most consequentially China's strategic stockpile, whose level is not published. A fall in observed stocks is a fall in the observed part. It is not a census.
Prices, the supply and demand balance, refining, the two-clock rule and the plain-English glossary that serves all 13 ledgers.
Back to the hub →LedgerWhere 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, $96.05 front against $72.60 a year out, $23.45 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 →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 →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.