2026.08.1120:57:25UTC+00US Crude Inventories Beat Expectations

US crude oil inventories rose by 9.07 million barrels in the week ending August 7, sharply contrasting with market expectations for a 500,000-barrel draw and following a 2.69 million-barrel build the previous week. The larger-than-anticipated increase was driven in part by higher crude imports relative to exports.

Despite the latest weekly gain, commercial crude inventories excluding the Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR) have fallen by just over 49 million barrels over the past 17 weeks. On a year-to-date basis, however, they remain up by 1.88 million barrels. During the same week, a further 6.1 million barrels were released from the SPR, leaving total reserves at 298.7 million barrels—close to the widely recognized operational minimum of 250–300 million barrels.

At the storage hub in Cushing, Oklahoma, inventories rose by 1.57 million barrels, following a 2.36 million-barrel increase in the prior week. Meanwhile, US crude oil production edged up to 13.804 million barrels per day from 13.796 million barrels per day, an increase of 600,000 barrels per day compared with the same period a year earlier.