Well, if it took him until today to draw that conclusion, I have to ask why. Nothing substantial really changed in terms of the overall picture. I wonder what he thought the total production would be for the week that today's number would have shocked him?
Exports for the year as of the end of August have totalled 12.969M barrels. If I use that average and extend it for the year, that's 19.453M barrels. There's 42 gallons in a barrel so that's 0.8 billion gallons exported.
That's 14B gallons left for domestic. Assuming the run rate this week remains constant through the end of the year.
Three thoughts about that:
1. If I was an ethanol producer, I would of ran and sold every gallon I could the past week.
2. The RFS will have a lot to say about what the final demand will be.
3. As I alluded to earlier, how much did things really change this week? Production increased by a whopping 24k barrels over last week, from 946k to 970k barrels. That's just over 1M gallons. Extend that out over the final 7 weeks and you get an increase of a WHOPPING 8 million gallons.
Was a projected increase of a whole 8 million gallons over the balance of the year as a result of today's numbers REALLY enough to suddenly cause a panic about overshooting the mark by 0.8 BILLION gallons? That's 800 million gallons, not 8 million.
I smell something. Do you?