Diesel Tightness Tracker

StorageCurve multiplies the EIA US Gulf Coast ultra-low-sulfur diesel spot price in dollars per gallon by 42 gallons per barrel, then subtracts the EIA weekly Brent spot price in dollars per barrel.

It means a barrel of finished diesel is valuable relative to the crude benchmark used to make it. That can reflect scarce distillate supply, strong demand, refinery constraints, regional logistics or a combination of those conditions.

It is the latest weekly EIA observation available to the updater, not an intraday futures quote. The data-through date appears beside the tracker and the source release date appears under the chart.

Gulf Coast diesel is linked to waterborne product and crude markets, so Brent provides a useful international feedstock benchmark. A WTI-based crack answers a related but different regional refining-margin question.

No. A 3-2-1 spread models two barrels of gasoline and one barrel of distillate from three barrels of crude. This page isolates diesel by comparing one barrel-equivalent of ULSD with one barrel of Brent.

Refining breaks or “cracks” large hydrocarbon molecules in crude oil into smaller products. The spread is the price difference between the refined product and its crude feedstock benchmark.

It uses EIA API v2 series PET.WDISTUS1.W, weekly US ending stocks of total distillate fuel oil. StorageCurve converts the published thousand-barrel values to million barrels for display.

Distillate demand has a seasonal shape influenced by winter heating, freight, agriculture and maintenance. Comparing the same ISO week across prior years prevents the normal calendar cycle from looking like a new tightening event.

The page divides total US distillate stocks by the four-week average of domestic distillate product supplied. It is a domestic-demand framing and does not pretend exports have disappeared from the wider balance.

It is the standard EIA proxy for domestic consumption, calculated from supply, trade, refinery and stock-change terms. It is not a direct meter on every end user and weekly values can be noisy.

Both domestic users and foreign buyers pull barrels from the US product system. Adding four-week average exports to product supplied describes total offtake pressure on US distillate supply more completely than either term alone.

Weekly product supplied and export estimates are volatile around holidays, weather and reporting changes. A four-week average keeps the direction while reducing the chance that one noisy week dominates the score.

It means the refinery system transmitting crude supply into finished distillate. The component combines utilization with product pull relative to distillate output, rather than treating capacity use alone as available supply.

High utilization means the system is already running hard and has less easy capacity response. It is not automatically bullish because yields and maintenance matter, which is why utilization carries only part of the smallest weighted component.

The tracker uses EIA series PET.WDIRPUS2.W, weekly US refiner and blender net production of distillate fuel oil. Four-week output is compared with total product pull.

No. It is a national proxy triggered by a sudden weekly fall in refinery utilization or distillate production. Planned maintenance, yield shifts or weekly estimation noise can create the same pattern.

A disruption is an event flag, not a smoothly comparable market state. Keeping it separate prevents one noisy weekly move from silently overpowering the crack, inventory and pull evidence.

EIA v1 does not provide a complete, timely weekly API feed of confirmed plant-level outages. The page states that gap instead of presenting a national movement as a named facility event.

The diesel crack contributes 45%, inventories 25%, product pull 20% and refinery transmission 10%. Each component is converted to a same-week percentile before the weights are applied.

Higher means more of the observed middle-distillate conditions sit on the tight side of their recent seasonal ranges. It is a relative state scale, not a probability that crude oil will rise.

The product crack can reprice when finished barrels are scarce even before the crude benchmark changes. Persistent stock deficits, strong pull and limited refinery response provide the physical confirmation that a price move alone lacks.

No. Crude supply, macro conditions, freight, refinery economics, positioning, policy and geopolitics can overwhelm a product signal. The tracker describes current conditions and does not publish a price target or timing claim.

Five years balances recency with enough same-week observations to describe seasonality. Structural refinery closures or demand changes can still make that history imperfect, so the raw values remain visible beside the percentiles.

The underlying petroleum balance updates weekly with the EIA Weekly Petroleum Status Report. Weekly spot-price observations can have holiday gaps, so the tracker advances only when every required series aligns to one week.

No. It is a transparent market-context tool using public EIA data. It does not know a visitor’s position, horizon or risk, and it does not recommend an order or investment decision.