The Energy Information Administration releases its Weekly Petroleum Status Report (WPSR) every week at the same place on its website, rather than as scattered announcements. For anyone tracking how much oil America has stored up and how fast that's changing, the way the report is organized — not just the headline numbers — determines how quickly you can understand what really happened.

The Report's Structure

The report comes in pieces, and each piece serves a different purpose. The Highlights page is a standalone PDF that gives you the top-line story first: how much oil got added to or withdrawn from storage that week. That's what traders and analysts glance at before diving deeper.

Alongside it sits a Data Overview PDF that combines two of the report's main tables into one document. It shows both the overall oil balance sheet and what refineries were processing — useful if you want the fuller picture without hunting through separate files.

Table 1, the U.S. Petroleum Balance Sheet, is the core of the whole release. It comes in three formats: CSV (a spreadsheet format that computers can read directly), Excel, and PDF. That matters more than it might sound. The CSV is what automated trading systems and data companies ingest directly to calculate stock changes instantly. The PDF is what people use when they want to compare this week's numbers to previous weeks on their own.

The balance sheet ties together everything: how much oil the U.S. produced, how much it imported, how much it exported, how much refineries used, and what that adds up to in terms of storage gain or loss. That arithmetic produces the headline figure — whether there was a "crude draw" (storage went down) or "crude build" (storage went up) — that can move the price of crude oil intraday.

Table 4 breaks storage down by region: the Petroleum Administration for Defense Districts (PADDs). The PADD regions matter because crude oil moves differently depending on where it sits and what infrastructure surrounds it. A storage increase in the Gulf Coast (PADD 3) often reflects export or refinery decisions; the same move in the Midwest (PADD 2) usually stems from trading activity around Cushing, Oklahoma, the main delivery point for WTI crude futures. For traders working with regional price differences or refinery margins — what's called a "crack spread" — the regional breakdown in Table 4 tells you far more than the national total ever will.

A Real Example: August 2022

In August 2022, the market caught a surprise. On August 3, Reuters reported that U.S. crude inventories rose when analysts had expected them to fall. The increase came from lower exports and slower refinery activity, according to EIA data. Gasoline stockpiles also grew. The build contradicted the consensus forecast, which is exactly the kind of shock that Table 1 is designed to explain: the export and refinery-input lines show you whether a storage gain came from less of America's oil leaving the country, or from refineries running slower, or from higher production at home.

Why Format Discipline Matters

One week's surprise is noise without context. The real question is always: what produced the number? A storage build driven by lower exports tells a completely different story from one driven by refineries churning less crude, or by wells pumping more oil. The first points to global shipping economics and overseas demand. The second points to domestic refinery profit margins. Mixing them up is how traders end up on the wrong side of the market when the 10:30 a.m. ET Wednesday release hits.

The report's structure makes that decomposition possible. You can separate the impact of exports from refinery inputs from domestic production, region by region. None of this predicts next week's number — there is no crystal ball in these tables. What the structure does is let you understand a surprise instead of simply react to the headline. For the desks that trade around the release, that understanding of what drove the number — not just what the number was — is where the real edge lives.