While analysts and industry officials hail the tightening of the oil market and the rebalancing of supply and demand, the huge build of global stocks last year poses the question of what happened to all those barrels of oil accumulated during the COVID-19 shock to demand. The ‘missing oil barrels’ may be distorting the analysts’ view of how balanced the market really is, Jinjoo Lee of The Wall Street Journal argues . The ‘missing barrels’ issue tends to resurface on the oil market when there is a large distortion of supply and demand or a shock to the balances, which 2020 undoubtedly was. The market has to contend with ‘missing barrels’ in nearly every oil cycle, according to the paper ‘The COVID-19 Shock and the Curious Case of Missing Barrels’ by Bassam Fattouh, Andreas Economou, and Michal Meidan of the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies. The so-called missing barrels […]