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US commercial petroleum inventories rose slightly last week with gasoline and distillate fuel inventories rising, crude oil inventories unchanged and propane/propylene inventories dropping. Refinery operations dropped for a second week and production of both gasoline and distillate fuels fell. On the demand side, gasoline demand is picking back up, but still down 1.9% from last year and with jet fuel demand down 18.8% total product demand is still down more than 6.5%.

US Petroleum Supplies and Refining At a Glance

• Total Petroleum Inventories: Up 1.2 million barrels
• Crude Oil Inventories: Unchanged
• Gasoline Inventories: Up 2.0 million barrels
• Distillate Fuels Inventories: Up 2600,000 barrels
• Propane/propylene inventories: Down
• Refinery Crude Inputs: 14.5 million barrels/day
• Change: Down 154,000 barrels/day
• Refinery Activity: 84.6%

US Petroleum Demand At a Glance
Compared to Same 4-Week Period Last Year

• Total Products Supplied: Down 6.6%
• Gasoline: Down 1.9%
• Distillate Fuel: Down 4.6%
• Jet Fuel: Down 18.8%

This Week in Petroleum focuses on trying to get oil price forecasts right, noting that

multiple hard-to-predict factors...drive oil markets. On top of that, the significance of each factor can change quickly with little notice. To have the best shot at producing a good forecast of short-term oil prices, oil analysts need to accurately predict all of the factors below, appropriately weight each of the factors according to its influence on the market, and then hope that nothing unforeseen will occur.

Oil report and This Week in Petroleum November 13 2008 [PDF]

Full current report with data tables [PDF]