Week In Review – May 21, 2021
Oil prices were highly volatile throughout the week as the Colonial Pipeline (CPL) slowly returned to normal operations. Gas stations across much of the Southeast are now slowly starting to see a return to normal fuel deliveries. Given that the supply chain needs time to catch consumers’ demand, prices shifted as predicted throughout the week.
On Wednesday, oil prices fell lower than expected, falling short of their rally that started at the beginning of the week when crude oil rose above $70/bbl. The EIA reported weekly inventory data, the first report to incorporate data on the Colonial Pipeline outage. True to expectations, fuel inventories fell in PADDs 1B (Central East Coast) and 1C (Lower East Coast) while rising a combined 6.9 million barrels in the Gulf Coast. Overall, fuel inventories fell throughout the country, but crude inventories rose. Refinery activity rose for the week to 86.3%, but has not yet hit pre-outage highs set in late April.
On Thursday, the International Energy Agency (IEA) dropped a surprising report encouraging no new oil and gas investments after 2021. The statement followed a net-zero emissions summit, which set a goal of net-zero emissions by no later than 2050. This, along with in-depth discussions by the Federal Reserve about inflation and the steps taken to prevent it, rounded off this week’s major news.
This Week in Energy Prices
Today crude opened at a price of $61.89, a decrease of $3.61 from Monday’s opening price of $65.50. Crude remained mostly flat throughout the entire week, with the highest opening price of $66.33 on Tuesday morning. Today’s opening price of $61.89 was the lowest in a 3-week period.
Today diesel opening at $1.9605, a decrease of $0.0765 from Monday’s opening price of $2.0370. Diesel prices this week remained mostly unchanged with today’s opening price being the lowest of week.
Today gasoline opened at a price of $2.0471, a decrease of $0.08 from Monday’s opening price of $2.1271. Throughout the week gasoline prices were stagnant, resulting in little change day-to-day.
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