US commercial crude stocks fall 3.1 million barrels as total inventories drop 8.5 million

US commercial crude oil inventories, excluding the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, fell by 3.1 million barrels to 412.5 million barrels in the week ending 16 October, the US Energy Information Administration (EIA) said in its Weekly Petroleum Status Report on 21 October 2026. That leaves crude stocks 3% below the five-year average.

Products

Gasoline inventories fell by 3.0 million barrels and are 5% below the five-year average. Distillate inventories rose by 1.7 million barrels but remain 9% below the five-year average. Propane and propylene stocks fell by 0.5 million barrels and are 13% above average.

Across all products, total commercial petroleum inventories fell by 8.5 million barrels in the week.

Refining, imports and demand

Refineries processed 16.6 million barrels per day (b/d), up 34,000 b/d on the previous week, running at 93.4% of capacity. Gasoline output averaged 9.8 million b/d and distillate production rose to 5.2 million b/d.

Crude oil imports fell by 291,000 b/d to 5.8 million b/d. Over four weeks they averaged 6.1 million b/d, 2.8% above a year earlier.

Total product supplied averaged 21.1 million b/d over the past four weeks, up 3.2% year on year. Four-week gasoline product supplied rose 1.5% to 8.7 million b/d, distillate fell 2.4% to 3.9 million b/d, and jet fuel rose 1.4%.

Changes to the report

From this issue the EIA has stopped publishing the weekly spot-price tables (Tables 11 and 12), moving third-party spot price data to a daily release, and has dropped Table 14 on retail gasoline and diesel prices, which repeated data it already publishes the day before. The report’s appendices have also been discontinued.

Related

The International Energy Agency’s latest view of the oil market, including diesel, is in our brief on its October oil market report. Our daily markets digest carries the oil price closes.