In prime time evening news of the Australian public broadcaster ABC TV, on 21 June 2017, the business presenter Alan Kohler tried to explain a fall in oil prices by “record oil inventories around the world”
http://www.abc.net.au/news/business/kohler-report/
Well, let’s go around the world on a map and stay where we are, in Australia. In google, type in the search word “Australian Petroleum Statistics” and you get this website:
http://www.environment.gov.au/energy/petroleum-statistics
Click on the latest issue and then on the download PDF file, in this case April 2017
Search for the word “stocks” and that brings you to tables 6 and 7
Table 7 End of month stocks of petroleum, consumption cover
In the last column “IEA days of net imports coverage it is 89.5 days for 2010/11 and 55.2 days for 2015/17. Go to the bottom of the column and it’s 50.5 days. The year-on-year decline is 3.1%. That doesn’t look like a record now. If anything, it’s a record low. Let’s put that into a graph:
Fig 1: Australia’s net imports coverage in days as defined by IEA
Australia is a member of the IEA (International Energy Agency)
Fig 2: Australian Prime Minster shaking hands with IEA’s Fatih Birol, Feb 2017
We check the coverage on the IEA website and find 48 days for March
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