Investing.com -- U.S. crude oil stockpiles fell by 10.6 million barrels last week, according to a government report on Wednesday that showed a third straight week of such inventory declines as refiners maxed out fuel processing to prepare for this year’s last hurrah in summer travel.
The upcoming Labor Day on Sept 4 unofficially brings to a close U.S. road trips for this summer and the Energy Information Administration, or EIA, said in its Weekly Petroleum Status Report that refiners maintained an extraordinarily high 93.3% run rate on their capacity for the week ended Aug. 25.
Exports of U.S. crude also remained solidly within the 4.0-5.0 million barrel-per-day mark as American energy firms found more demand overseas amid a supply vacuum and underserved buyers caused by Saudi and Russian production cuts, the weekly EIA report showed. Last week alone, U.S crude exports were at 4,528M barrels, on top of the 4,258M-barrel shipment noted for the week ended Aug. 18.
The net result of the refining runs and crude exports pulled some 10.584M barrels from inventories during the week ended Aug 25, the EIA said. Prior to this, the agency reported a 6.135M drawdown for the week to Aug. 18 and a 5.960M pull for the week ended Aug. 11.
On the gasoline inventory front, the EIA reported a decline of 0.214M barrels, after a slide of 1.467M barrels last week. Analysts had forecast a decline of 0.933M for last week. Automotive fuel gasoline is the No. 1 U.S. fuel product.
With distillate stockpiles, there was a build of 1.235M that added to the prior week’s gain of 0.945M.