Back in July there was considerable hand-wringing about US oil demand cratering because of high prices. That went against decades of data showing the elasticity of oil demand.
In any case, the EIA is now out with revised estimates of demand and they show demand at 8.749 million barrels per day compared ot 8.460mbpd in 2020.
Moreover, because of spike in demand for flights and other products, total demand for US oil was way higher than 2020 and up compared to 2021 when crude prices were much lower.
The takeaway here is that gasoline demand is still highly inelastic and that a fresh spike in oil prices won’t cause a large degree of demand destruction.
WTI crude is trading down about 50-cents today as the market breathes a sigh of relief that Putin didn’t announce an escalation in Ukraine.
