Crude inventories, read from the roof.
Crude terminals store oil in floating-roof tanks. The roof rides on the oil, so its height is the fill. We measure it tank by tank from satellite data, day or night and through cloud, and add the tanks up into site stocks in barrels.
01/Crude inventories
The roof floats. We read how high.
01/Orbit
Seen from space, a crude tank is a white circle.
02/Roof
Its roof floats on the oil. Satellite data picks up where it sits, day or night, through cloud.
03/Level
When the roof goes down, the tank is emptying. We turn that level into barrels.
Tank fill
81%
≈ 970 thousand barrels
02/Latest read
China's crude draw has paused near its lowest level since April 20251,162 million barrels in the week to 9 October, then 1,168 by 23 October, read across 137 sites. From April to September, lower refinery runs covered half of a 561 million barrel import shortfall, the tanks more than a third.