A looming oil glut has taken over the energy commodities market as the dominating sentiment among traders and analysts. Everyone is predicting a glut—the only difference is in its size. But there is a fly in the bearish ointment. The IEA admitted this week that it was unable to account for 1.47 million barrels of supply.
The International Energy Agency deepened the glut mood last week, when it predicted a supply overhang of 2.35 million barrels daily for this year, and an all-time high surplus of 4 million barrels daily for 2026. In the same report, however, the IEA admitted it cannot place some 1.47 million barrels daily in global supply for August.
This is nothing abnormal in oil supply estimation, Reuters’ Ron Bousso noted in a report on the matter, but the size of the barrels that are unaccounted for casts a shadow over the accuracy of the IEA’s predictions. It suggests that in August, the global supply overhang may have been 1.47 million barrels daily larger than the IEA estimated or, then again, 1.47 million barrels daily smaller. The number for August gains even more significance in light of the fact that it is a sizable increase on earlier “missing barrel” estimates: 850,000 bpd for July and 370,000 bpd for the second quarter of the year, per Bousso, who cited IEA data.
While the IEA looks for the lost barrels, other agencies are updating their supply and demand forecasts for 2026—and prices just inched up because apparently some traders got fed up with the glut hysteria.
BloombergNEF, for instance, not known for its bullish tendencies, has revised its supply growth prediction for 2026 by 200,000 barrels daily for an oversupply size of 3.3 million barrels daily. For this year, the agency sees oversupply at 1.16 million barrels daily, which raises the question of how the prediction for 2026 would come true when gluts tend to push prices and drilling down, curbing output instead of boosting it twofold.
The U.S. Energy Information Administration expects a supply overhang of 1.9 million barrels daily this year, growing to 2.1 million barrels daily in 2026. The numbers are an upward revision of earlier forecasts for a 1.7-million-bpd surplus this year and a 1.6-million-bpd overhang for 2026.
Bloomberg, meanwhile, stoked the glut fire by reporting there were 1 billion barrels of crude oil on tankers at sea. The report noted this was oil in transit, meaning some of it, at least, is en route from seller to buyer, but the implication was that a lot of the oil was actually looking for a buyer in an oversupplied market.
“Crude cargoes from the Middle East are starting to go unsold and key price gauges signal that supply scarcity is ending,” Bloomberg wrote, which is an interesting point to make, seeing as there has not been talk about any sort of supply scarcity for months.
“For the last 12 months we’ve all known that there’s this surplus that’s coming,” Trafigura’s global head for oil, Ben Luckock, said earlier this month as quoted by Bloomberg. “I think it really is just about here now.”
“The most straightforward of economic concepts is driving this decline: There’s simply too much supply relative to how much the world is consuming,” analyst Rory Johnston from Commodity Context told the Financial Post.
The IEA, meanwhile, reported in its latest monthly update that in August, oil on water declined by 8 million bpd. It followed up with preliminary estimates that oil on water surged to 102 million over the next month. That would be quite a sudden buildup in oil in floating storage over a very short period of time and would perfectly justify preparations for a glut.
Oil prices, in the meantime, however, have ticked higher. One of the reasons seems to be that some market observers have developed something of a glut fatigue and are starting to doubt the predictions. As UBS’ Giovanni Staunovo wrote this week in a note, “While supply concerns have increased in recent weeks again, we believe the oil market is oversupplied but not in a glut.”
Concern about supply security from Russia also contributed to the latest in oil, suggesting that the supply overhang is not large enough, indeed, to leave traders cold to the news that a peace summit between the presidents of Russia and the United States had been put on hold. According to Reuters, U.S. pressure on Asian oil buyers from Russia had also contributed to the shift in oil supply sentiment.
Now, if the supply excess was as large as the IEA, the EIA, BloombergNEF, and Bloomberg proper, plus dozens of other forecasters have suggested, then the above developments in geopolitics would not have really mattered much for oil prices. The fact that they do suggests still existent sensitivity to supply disruptions, meaning the perception of a glut is a fragile one.
By Irina Slav for Oilprice.com
