For the past year or so, I have been periodically publishing new articles to this site tracking the development of the nation’s oil inventories as one of the most widely blamed reasons for the rapid decline in oil prices last year is that the nation was greatly oversupplied with oil. While the numbers do indicate an oversupply of oil, the full story is much more complicated than that, as I have discussed in numerous columns. I regret that I have not been able to post new articles in this series in a few weeks, but this is something that I am committed to correcting going forward.

At the end of the week ended September 18, 2015, the nation’s commercial inventories of crude oil contained a total of 454.0 million barrels of crude oil. This represents a decrease of 1.9 million barrels compared to the 455.9 million barrels that were in these same inventories at the end of the week ended September 11, 2015. However, despite this week-over-week decline, the nation’s oil inventories contain well above the typical levels for this time of year. These inventories also contain much more oil than they had at the end of the corresponding week of last year. At the end of the week ended September 19, 2014, the nation’s inventories contained a total of 358.0 million barrels of crude oil.

While oil inventories have generally been significantly above their average levels for the past several months, the same is not true of gasoline inventories. These have generally been relatively stable year-over-year. The same is true in the most recent week. At the end of the week ended September 18, 2015, the nation’s commercial inventories of motor gasoline contained a total of 218.8 million barrels. This is a slight increase over the 217.4 million barrels that these same inventories contained at the end of the week ended September 11, 2015. While this is higher than last year’s levels, the year-over-year increase is fairly minor. At the end of the week ended September 19, 2014, these same inventories contained a total of 210.3 million barrels of gasoline.

One of the reasons for the increase in gasoline inventories is that gasoline production increased week-over-week. During the four-week period ended September 18, 2015, the nation’s oil refineries supplied an average of 9.163 million barrels of gasoline per day to the market. This compares to the daily average of 9.157 million barrels per day supplied by these same refineries during the four-week period ended September 11, 2015. As has been the trend for quite some time, this was a higher production level than during the corresponding period of last year. During the four-week period ended September 19, 2014, the nation’s oil refineries supplied an average of 8.895 million barrels of gasoline per day.

Interestingly, this increase in gasoline production comes in spite of the fact that the nation’s refineries processed less crude oil than in previous weeks. During the four-week period ended September 18, 2015, the nation’s refineries processed an average of 16.304 million barrels of crude oil per day. This compares to the 16.418 million barrels per day average than these same refineries processed during the four-week period ended September 11, 2015. It has been the trend that the nation’s refineries have been consistently processing more crude oil than during the corresponding periods of the previous year. This trend was broken during the most recent week. This is because these same refineries processed an average of 16.320 million barrels of crude oil per day during the year-ago period.

Thus, gasoline production increased despite an overall decrease in refinery utilization. This could indicate that the nation’s refineries are devoting a higher proportion of their output to gasoline production for some reason. Overall though, the nation continues to have very high quantities of oil and this will preclude any recovery in oil prices in the near-term.