The EIA Petroleum Status Report, explained

Every year-round number on The Fill Line traces back to one document: the Weekly Petroleum Status Report, the US Energy Information Administration's weekly accounting of the country's petroleum system. Traders shorten it to the WPSR or just the weekly. It covers crude oil and every major product, but a handful of its tables are the propane market's weekly scoreboard, and reading them takes about five minutes once you know where to look.

What it is and when it lands

EIA publishes the WPSR every Wednesday at 10:30 a.m. Eastern, covering the week that ended the prior Friday. When a federal holiday falls early in the week the release slips a day, usually to Thursday at noon. The data behind it comes from EIA's weekly surveys of refineries, gas plants, pipelines, bulk terminals and importers, so the report describes the primary supply system, the bulk layer of the market, not the dealer plants or the tank behind the house. The weekly figures are estimates, and EIA later trues them up in its monthly Petroleum Supply Monthly, so a week's number can be revised months after the fact. The direction of the weekly moves is the signal; the third decimal is not.

The propane tables that matter

For propane the report boils down to two things: the stocks number and the supply balance behind it.

Stocks are the headline. The WPSR reports propane and propylene inventories in primary storage, for the country and by PADD district, with the Rockies and West Coast combined into a single PADD 4-5 figure. The two products are counted together because they share storage and pipelines. This is the number the market reacts to on Wednesday morning, and it is the number this site charts against its five-year band.

The chart above is that series, live. A fresh release moves the last point on this line.

The supply balance explains why stocks moved. Four series do the work. Production is what gas plants and refineries made that week. Imports and exports are what crossed the border in each direction, and for US propane the export line is by far the larger of the two. Product supplied is the fourth, and it needs a sentence of translation: it measures the volume that left the primary supply chain for the market that week, which is why EIA treats it as implied demand. It is measured upstream of any actual sale, but it is the closest weekly read on consumption the public data offers.

How to read a fresh release

Start with the stock change: did propane inventories build or draw, and by how much. Then place the new level against what is normal for the date, since propane stocks are supposed to swing across the seasons; a build is routine in July and a draw is routine in January. This site does that placement automatically, comparing each week to the five-year median for the same calendar week.

Then read the balance to see what drove the change. A draw can come from cold weather showing up in product supplied, or from a hot export week, or from soft production, and those are different stories. The arithmetic is simple: production plus imports, minus exports and product supplied, is roughly the week's stock change. When a draw shows up with mild weather, the export line is usually the answer.

The table above is the live production series with its week-over-week and vs-normal readings, the same treatment every series on this page gets.

Where each series lives on this site

Each WPSR propane series has a page here that updates when the report lands. The inventories pages carry stocks for the US and each district against the five-year band. The supply pages carry production, imports, exports and demand, each with the US line and its regional composition. Together they are the whole propane portion of the report, restated with history and context attached.

What the WPSR does not tell you

Two limits are worth stating plainly. First, there are no propane prices in it. Residential and wholesale prices come from a separate EIA survey that runs only during heating season, October through March, which is its own guide. Second, the stocks figure covers primary storage only, so the retail market can tighten on the ground during a cold snap before the national number registers it. The report describes the wholesale system's cushion, not any one county's delivery week.

The Fill Line reports the WPSR's propane figures as EIA publishes them, dated to the week they cover. It describes what moved and what drove it; it does not forecast next week's number and it never advises a reader on when to buy, lock or fill.

The Fill Line is a free weekly read of the public propane numbers. Stocks, the Mont Belvieu spot and the weekly supply balance update year round; the state price survey resumes in October. One email a week on what moved.