Global Oil Inventories

Global Oil Inventories is a ready-made data subscription from Ursa Space Systems that measures the crude oil held in about 28,000 storage tanks across 130 countries, with multi-year historical coverage. Inventories are a key gauge of the oil market's supply-demand balance, but official figures are slow or missing for much of the world, and Ursa notes that outside the OECD publicly available data is sorely lacking.

Ursa collects synthetic aperture radar (SAR) satellite imagery of floating-roof storage tanks from multiple SAR vendors. Because SAR works day or night and through cloud, the same tanks can be measured every week. A proprietary algorithm measures how far each tank's floating lid sits below its rim and, with the tank's dimensions, calculates the barrels inside. Every measurement passes a quality-control process that combines automation with human review.

Tank-level results, with tank owner, terminal, storage type and an error range, are released through a documented REST API in near real time as they are processed, and weekly aggregates are updated every Thursday. Weekly PDF reports and CSV files are also delivered. Ursa publishes Cushing, Oklahoma inventory data on Monday mornings, two days before the US Energy Information Administration (EIA) report, and reports a 0.98 correlation with EIA's Cushing figures. In 2018 S&P Global Platts agreed to incorporate Ursa's global oil storage data into its Platts Analytics products and services. Blacklight Research has said access to Ursa's oil storage data gave it a key edge in anticipating shifts in oil market fundamentals and prices in 2017. The data is also sold through the SkyFi platform.