Oil Chartpack

Footage per well is measured depth, the vertical section plus the horizontal lateral, so it rises with the lateral: an oil well averaged 4,700 feet in 2005 and 17,500 feet in 2025; a gas well 7,000 feet and 20,300 feet. There is no free national series of lateral length alone; the best published one, for the Permian, is licensed from Enverus and shows the average new lateral going from 6,149 feet in 2015 to 10,867 feet in 2025 (EIA, Today in Energy). EIA’s trajectory split counts horizontal and directional wells together and does not separate oil from gas; the rig chart does, from 2013, and covers the rigs working now rather than wells finished.
Hydraulic fracturing has no equivalent series: no agency publishes the share of new wells fractured each year. In practice almost every horizontal shale well is fractured, and EIA’s one count, for 2016, put fractured horizontal wells at 69% of US wells drilled and 83% of footage. Nor is there a world figure for either measure: Baker Hughes publishes trajectory only for the US and Canada, and outside North America horizontal fracturing at scale is limited to a handful of plays, chief among them Vaca Muerta in Argentina and the Sichuan shale gas fields in China.

Energy Institute Statistical Review. Capacity is atmospheric distillation capacity at year end, from 1965 (Russia from 1980, before which it sits inside the USSR); throughput is the annual average, from 1980 (Russia from 1990). Utilisation divides throughput by the average of the year-end capacity either side of the year, so a unit commissioned in December does not count as a full year of capacity. The European Union is its current 27 members throughout. In 2025 the world ran 80% of capacity, the United States 89% and Russia 73%. Throughput is counted differently from EIA’s gross inputs, so the US figure sits a few points below EIA’s weekly utilisation.

EIA Weekly Petroleum Status Report: refiner and blender net production of each product divided by refiner net input of crude oil, both summed over four weeks. Gasoline is finished motor gasoline, so it includes blended ethanol and blending components bought in rather than made from crude, which is why the four shares can add up to slightly more than 100% of crude runs. The reference line is the median of the eight years before 2026leaving out 2020, whose pandemic runs distort every product’s share; the band is the range over the same years.

LNG: the IEA Gas Market Report’s year-on-year fall in Qatar and UAE loadings (March), and in Middle East LNG supply (April to June, net of higher Omani exports and cargoes delivered inside the Gulf; the two measures agree within rounding over March to June, 35 bcm). A bcm a month is about 1.16 Bcf/d; the right axis is the share of world LNG trade, 48.2 bcm a month in 2025.The IEA publishes no monthly figure after June, but Qatar has all but halted shipments since one of its tankers was attacked in late July, and the IEA’s own rule of thumb is about 10 bcm lost for every month without transits, so the missing months are not smaller. Two Ras Laffan trains, 12.8 Mt a year, were damaged in March and will take three to five years to repair. Iran’s pipeline exports to Iraq recovered quickly and to Turkey were unaffected, and no source puts a number on Russian gas export losses from Ukrainian strikes, so neither is charted. LPG: Gulf exports against their 2025 average of 1.5 mb/d, from the IEA Oil Market Report (March is Hormuz transits only; April and May all routes); the right axis is the share of world seaborne LPG, 145 Mt in 2025, taken as about 4.6 mb/d at an assumed 11.6 barrels a tonne. The IEA gives no LPG-only figure after May; Kpler reported LPG crossings of Hormuz at zero in mid-July. Russian LPG from Novatek’s Ust-Luga complex was suspended after strikes in March, August and September 2026, with no published volume.

Refining margins

Spot prices for conventional gasoline, ultra-low sulphur diesel and kerosene-type jet fuel at the US Gulf Coast, and WTI at Cushing, from EIA via FRED. A crack is the gross margin a refiner earns converting a barrel of crude into that product, before operating costs.

The grey band is the lowest and highest level in the same week or month across the five previous years, and the dashed line their average; a band point is drawn only where all five years have data. The United States is EIA weekly data, crude and total including the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. OECD, non-OECD and global are JODI monthly closing stocks, which include government stocks, summed over a fixed set of countries that reported every month since January 2021, so a country starting or stopping reporting does not show up as a build or a draw. That rule costs the non-OECD most of its coverage: India stopped reporting in 2026, and China, Russia, Brazil, the UAE and Singapore do not report stocks at all, so the non-OECD and global panels are the reporting countries rather than the region. Days of cover divide stocks by demand (JODI’s total demand, EIA’s product supplied for the US) and, for crude, by refinery crude runs, over the countries that report both. Distillate is gasoil and diesel; jet fuel is jet kerosene. China’s crude is the estimate described below.

China

China publishes no inventory data. The analysts who estimate it (EIA, the IEA, Kpler, Vortexa) mostly work the same way: crude supply, meaning production plus imports minus exports, less the crude refineries actually ran, with the remainder assumed to have gone into tanks. Kpler and Vortexa add satellite and ship-tracking observations of the tanks themselves, which are subscription products; the IEA publishes its China figures in the paid Oil Market Report. EIA published a level: nearly 1.4 billion barrels at the end of December 2025, about 360 million of it government-held and the rest commercial stocks the national oil companies have been directed to hold for emergencies (EIA, Today in Energy, 20 April 2026). The charts below take that level and move it month by month with the same balance, using JODI for supply and the National Bureau of Statistics’ measured refinery runs. Measured over 2025 this method gives average builds of 1,088 kb/d, against EIA’s estimate of about 1.1 million barrels a day, which is the check that it tracks.

The residual also absorbs crude burned without refining and any error in the trade data, so treat a single month with caution and the trend with more confidence. China’s runs come from the NBS rather than JODI: the JODI refinery-intake figure for China equals production plus imports minus exports to the barrel every month, which means it is filled in as a balancing item and a balance built from it is zero by construction. NBS reports runs in tonnes, converted here at 7.3 barrels a tonne.

Timespread history is EIA’s daily first-to-fourth contract prices, which EIA stopped publishing after April 2024, then NYMEX settlements via ComCurv from mid-March 2026 (June 2026 for ULSD and RBOB). In between, both spreads are rebuilt from every individual contract’s daily settlement (TradingView), taking contract one as the nearest month that has not yet expired, so there is no roll to work around and no day is left out. Where the rebuilt series overlaps ComCurv’s sound data it matches to the cent. Products are converted from $/gal at 42 gallons a barrel.

The Brent timespreads are stitched from every individual ICE Brent contract’s daily settlement (TradingView) from July 2020, contract one being the nearest month not yet expired, and carried forward from the individual contracts on Yahoo Finance; EIA never published Brent futures. Brent was at a discount to WTI until the shale boom stranded crude inland at Cushing; the spread peaked near $30 in 2011 and narrowed once pipelines reached the Gulf Coast, before the US lifted its crude export ban in December 2015. Since then it has traded near the cost of shipping a barrel from the Gulf to Europe. See Oil 101 Chapter 17.

Stocks are measured against the average of the same month in the five years before, so a normal seasonal build does not look like a surplus. Spread is the WTI first-to-fourth month spread; there is no free daily Brent curve history, so both panels use WTI. Months with no spread data (May 2024 to February 2026) are missing. Both panels count strategic stocks: the US SPR releases of 2022 and 2026 moved barrels from government caverns into commercial tanks, so commercial stocks alone looked comfortable while the total fell. The second panel adds the US SPR to OECD commercial stocks (other OECD government stocks have no free monthly series in barrels and are held near a mandated level) and an estimate for China, which publishes no stock data: from December 2024, EIA’s December 2025 estimate of about 1.4 billion barrels moved by China’s implied monthly balance; before that, a straight line from 850 million barrels in mid-2016, the low end of what satellite tank counts saw through 2024, because the implied balance overstates the build over those years by about a billion barrels. China enters the panel from June 2021, the first month with five years of estimates behind it, and the panel ends at the last month China can be estimated. With China counted, 2026 sits on the loose side of the line while the curve is steeply backwardated. The two readings are consistent: China added about 400 million barrels in 2025 to stocks it holds against its own emergencies, and the curve prices the barrels the market can reach, which those are not.

Gas timespreads are seasonal by nature: the October-November and March-April spreads carry the winter premium, so a month’s reading is best compared with the same month in earlier years. Sources as for the oil timespreads: EIA to April 2024, every individual contract on TradingView stitched into exact first-to-second and first-to-fourth spreads to September 2026, then ComCurv.

Energy Institute Statistical Review of World Energy 2025: marketed production, excluding gas flared or reinjected, and gross LNG trade. The US is 26% of world gas production and 25% of LNG exports. Oil equivalent is at 6,000 cubic feet of gas to the barrel, the SEC reporting convention; on energy content alone a barrel of oil is closer to 5,800. LNG tonnes use the EI’s approximate 0.73 million tonnes per billion cubic metres. The EI publishes several European importers, including Germany and the Netherlands, only inside an “other EU” total, so they cannot be ranked here, and the exporter list leaves out the EI’s “other” rows, which are mostly re-exports.

EIA petroleum supply and disposition for US production (field production at gas plants), exports and end-month stocks; Mont Belvieu front-month futures via ComCurv. The composite NGL barrel weights each product’s price by its share of US gas plant output over the latest twelve months (ethane 42%, propane 30%, normal butane 9%, isobutane 6%, natural gasoline 12%), so it is the value of the barrel US plants actually make, and it moves with the mix: ethane, the largest and cheapest component, is priced off natural gas rather than crude, which is why the barrel trades at a fraction of WTI (39% in October 2026). Ethane that is not worth recovering is left in the gas and sold as methane, so ethane output responds to its price against gas as well as to drilling.

EIA International Energy Statistics, crude and lease condensate monthly from 1980; natural gas plant liquids, other liquids (mostly biofuels) and refinery processing gain are annual before 1993 and held flat across each year’s months. US tight oil is EIA’s estimate by play, which EIA last updated for March 2024; after that it is carried forward by the STEO's Permian, Bakken and Eagle Ford output. Canadian oil sands are upgraded plus non-upgraded bitumen from the Canada Energy Regulator, from 2000. Both are carved out of crude and condensate, so the stack still adds up to EIA’s total. The fall at the right edge is real: the 2026 Strait of Hormuz closure took world crude and condensate from a record in early 2026 to the lowest since October 2020 within three months (see Oil 101 Chapter 26).

The trend is a log-linear fit to world consumption from January 1990 to December 2004, with a factor for each calendar month, extended forward: 1.7% a year. Before 2005 consumption tracked it closely; the price shock of 2005 to 2008 broke the pattern, and by September 2026 the world was using 12.6 mb/d less than the old trend implied. Observed is EIA’s monthly series; the shaded part is EIA’s forecast.

The same series as a change on a year earlier, which is where the 2026 Strait of Hormuz closure shows: world use fell about 4 mb/d below a year earlier in April and May 2026, against about 17 mb/d at the worst of Covid. On the level chart above that is a small dip. See Oil 101 Chapter 26.

Energy Institute Statistical Review world oil consumption to 2025; the shaded years are the change in EIA’s Short-Term Energy Outlook annual averages, measured on EIA’s own all-liquids basis. Demand has fallen in 10 of the 60 years since 1965; the table below says why.

Annual average crude price from the Energy Institute Statistical Review (S&P Global Energy data): the US average to 1944, Arabian Light posted at Ras Tanura from 1945 to 1983, and Brent dated since 1984. The Review restates every year in 2025 dollars using the US consumer price index; this chart carries that forward to August 2026 with the same index (FRED CPIAUCSL, ×1.038). 2026 is Brent's average from January to October 2026, from FRED, and is not a full year. The dashed line is today's price, the NYMEX WTI front-month settlement, which needs no inflation adjustment. A single CPI across 165 years is a rough instrument before 1913, when the index begins and earlier years are reconstructed, so read the nineteenth-century levels as orders of magnitude.

EIA International Energy Statistics consumption over World Bank population, barrels per person per year. BRICS is its ten members as of 2025 (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, the UAE and Indonesia) applied to every year, and starts in 1992 with Russia’s series. The European Union is its current 27 members throughout.

IEA figures are the central scenario of each World Energy Outlook: Reference to 2009, New Policies 2010 to 2018, Stated Policies 2019 to 2024; WEO 2025 reintroduced Current Policies and is shown under both. They are IEA “world oil” demand, which excludes biofuels, so they sit below EIA’s International Energy Outlook reference cases, which count all liquids. Actual is EIA’s world consumption, drawn twice: all liquids, and less other liquids (mostly biofuels) for the IEA basis. EIA published no world outlook in 2012, 2014, 2015, 2018, 2020, 2022, 2024 or 2025.