Global Oil Map

How to read the global oil picture

World oil is a flow problem before it is a price problem. Roughly a hundred million barrels are produced and consumed every day, and the map above organizes that system into the four views that explain most price moves: production by country, where supply is growing or shrinking; consumption by country, where demand is growing or shrinking; the supply and demand balance that falls out of the two; and trade routes, the tanker corridors and chokepoints, such as the Strait of Hormuz, that physically connect surplus regions to deficit regions. A disruption only moves the world price when it hits a flow that cannot be rerouted quickly, which is why the route view matters as much as the production view.

The global data changes slowly, in monthly and annual steps, so the weekly signals traders act on come from the United States, the largest producer and the source of the most frequent official data. The EIA weekly petroleum report, released Wednesdays, shows whether U.S. stocks are building or drawing against their five-year seasonal pattern, and the Baker Hughes rig count, released Fridays, shows whether U.S. drilling is expanding or contracting months before the production result appears. Read together, the two weekly releases explain most short-term moves in U.S. exports, and U.S. exports are the marginal flow that clears the Atlantic Basin balance on the map above.

A practical way to use this page: start with the balance view to see whether the world is adding to or drawing from storage, check the production and consumption views for which countries are driving the change, then use the trade routes view to judge how exposed that change is to a single corridor. When a headline claims a supply shock, the route and production views together show whether the affected barrels are a rounding error or a share of world supply large enough to matter, and the weekly U.S. data linked above shows whether the shock is already reaching the storage numbers.