I’ve got some data for you that is surprisingly bullish for oil.

Even more surprising is what that data relates to, those bloated U.S. oil storage levels.

The data I’m about to specifically shows you details the movement in amount of oil that the United States has in storage this year versus recent history.

All of the information comes from the EIA and you can access it through this link.

First, I want to show you is the amount of crude oil and petroleum products that the United States has in storage (excluding the Strategic Petroleum Reserve).

This includes crude oil as well as gasoline, diesel, jet fuel…..and so on.

The bottom line in the table below shows the change in the number of barrels in storage from the first week in January to the last week in June for each of the last six years.

Historically inventory levels build in the first half and are drawn down in the second half which includes the busier summer driving season.

The range is a 3.4 million barrel build this year all the way up to a 110 million barrel build in 2015.

You can see that this year has had by far the smallest build in crude oil and petroleum products inventory levels. The chart below makes that even more apparent.

The movement in U.S. total storage unquestionably looks a lot more bullish in 2017 doesn’t it? This year’s movement even looks considerably more bullish than the pre-glut years of 2012 and 2013.

I’m not cherry-picking data here for the sake of a story. What happens if I take petroleum product inventory levels out of the mix and just focus on crude oil storage?

Also bullish, as the table below shows.

Note that this data includes the Strategic Petroleum Reserve.

Because of that, the numbers are larger than you would typically be used to seeing if you were just looking at crude inventories excluding the SPR, but it doesn’t change the story. If we were to exclude the SPR the trend would look very similar.

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