According to the latest estimates, the world should still be awash in oil stockpiles built up during the pandemic. But that's not what the actual data on oil supplies show.
The International Energy Agency's latest report, published on Wednesday, shows that, if their supply-and-demand numbers are right, the world's oil stockpiles are about 660 million barrels higher than they were before the pandemic — that's equivalent to more than a month's worth of production by Saudi Arabia and Russia, the two biggest members of OPEC+.
Of course, there will always be some unmeasurable oil inventories that need to be guessed, so that global supply-and-demand balances make sense. The IEA suggests in its latest report where some of those places might be — for example, underground storage caverns, where fill levels can't be measured remotely; in new pipelines that need to be filled before they can be used; or in refined products in countries that don't report inventory levels.
Measuring oil supply and demand is tricky after all. In most places, oil production is routinely and accurately measured to assess tax liabilities, but that doesn't necessarily mean those figures are available to organisations like the IEA, certainly not in a timely fashion and sometimes not at all. Even where the data are relatively transparent, they are not always accurate, as the US Energy Information Administration found back in 1998, when it overestimated domestic production and underestimated demand and imports. That year, global oil production, consumption and inventory figures left 300 million barrels of oil unaccounted for.
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