Supply vs. Demand

We looked. Supply tracks demand. The price does not follow either one. This page stays as it is.

World supply and world demand are each about 100 million barrels a day. Producers pump about what the world uses. The gap is usually under 3 million barrels a day.

The US crude price does not follow those lines. From 2015 through the months before the strait, a higher month of demand was not a higher month of price. A change in supply barely moved the price either. The lines and the price drifted up together into 2022. Take that shared drift out and the link is gone.

Two holes are real, and they are not the ordinary month. In spring 2020 demand fell to about 80 million barrels a day and crude went to $17. In the published balance for spring 2026, supply fell to about 95 million barrels a day while demand stayed near 100, and crude rose from about $60 to about $100. That stretch is still being revised. Set it aside and the ordinary month is still producers tracking what gets used, and a price that arrives from somewhere else.

That is why Gas Prices takes the barrel as an input. The story is the Author's Note. The bibliography is Receipts.