Market sentiment has been fickle throughout summer, and despite the recent plateauing of oil prices, the IEA reassured everyone in its new monthly report that things are still proceeding apace. For example, in the second quarter, global inventories fell by 0.5 million barrels per day (mb/d), and preliminary data for July show that the strong inventory declines continued, particularly in the U.S., which showed a 790,000-bpd drawdown. Still, the inventories are falling from “great heights,” the top oil official at the IEA said, and they will take more time to normalize. Quite a bit of time, actually. The IEA estimates that even if global oil inventories decline by 0.5 mb/d through March 2018, when the OPEC deal is set to expire, inventories would still sit 60 million barrels above the five-year average. In other words, even if things continue to go well, without any hiccups, the […]