OECD Oil Inventory Tracker

EIA's own forecast, checked against the headlines made about it — not a one-time citation.

In September 2026 a viral tanker-tracking account and a JPMorgan quote about the Strait of Hormuz raised the question: if the closure keeps draining OECD oil stocks, when does the buffer break? A widely-cited figure at the time, sourced to EIA's own June 2026 Short-Term Energy Outlook, put OECD commercial inventories below 2.3 billion barrels by December 2026 — the lowest since records began in 2003. This page re-pulls EIA's own numbers every time a new STEO edition is published, so that claim stays checked instead of frozen in the month it was made.

OECD Commercial Inventory, Monthly

actual   EIA forecast (current edition)   reported Jun 2026 Dec-2026 floor (2,300 Mbbl)

What EIA's Own Model Says Right Now

Caveat, stated plainly: "days of supply" here divides commercial inventory by gross OECD consumption. It is a rough proxy, not the IEA's legal 90-day reserve obligation — that treaty figure is based on each member's net oil imports, not total consumption, and counts government-held strategic reserves alongside commercial stock. A country that produces most of what it burns can carry a low "days of supply" number here and still meet its treaty floor by a wide margin. Read the trend, not this number, as the treaty test.

Forecast Revision History

How EIA's own forecast for the current trough month has moved across successive STEO editions. One row per edition; this table grows as new editions are published (STEO is released roughly monthly).

Source: EIA Short-Term Energy Outlook, Table 3a. Refreshed on a schedule from EIA's public master workbook — no API key involved.