The EIA’s Short Term Energy Outlook…

There are lots of tasty morsels in the EIA’s monthly Short Term Energy Outlook, here are just a few:

On WTI/Brent price spreads:

”EIA estimates that, without pipeline constraints, moving crude oil from Cushing to the U.S. Gulf Coast typically costs about $3.50/b. EIA estimates that it costs approximately $0.50/b more to transport WTI from the United States to Asia than it costs to ship Brent from the North Sea to Asia. Although more infrastructure to export crude oil has been built recently, U.S. exporters must still use smaller, less-economic vessels or complex shipping arrangements, which add to costs.”

And, note the expected build in 2Q18 inventories (how will the market react?):

Note the bump up in unplanned non-OPEC outages:

Gasoline inventories look more plentiful than distillates compared to 5 year averages:

Here is the link:  https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/steo/pdf/steo_full.pdf