U.S. oil inventories fall to a 22-year low

Marketplace

News, Business

4.6 • 8.5K Ratings

🗓️ 4 June 2026

⏱️ 25 minutes

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Summary

Oil inventories have fallen drastically since President Trump launched the war against Iran. But it’s not because we’re suddenly using more fuel. Instead, the U.S. is exporting much more oil than usual — to places that can’t get enough with the Strait of Hormuz blocked. All this will have knock-on effects for oil prices in the U.S. for months to come. Plus: Investors want to yank more money from private credit firms, your social media algorithim is likely full of “stealth ads,” and we visit the elk antler market in Jackson Hole, Wyoming.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Oil, private credit, and elk antlers. Seriously. From American public media, this is Marketplace.
0:18.6	In Los Angeles, I'm Kyle Rizzdahl. It is Thursday, today the fourth day of June. Good as always, to have you along, everybody.
0:28.8	Here's a little choose-your-own adventure as we get started. Today, according to AAA, regular gas right now,
0:35.4	this is a national average, is $4.24 a gallon. That is,
0:40.7	depending on which adventure you choose, either down more than 18 cents from a week ago and
0:46.5	or nearly a buck 10 more than we were paying a year ago. We all know why, I imagine, but the ramifications aren't always clear.
0:57.0	The United States is exporting more of the oil that is produced here to make up for some of that
1:01.5	missing Persian Gulf supply, because it's a global market, right? But that in turn has helped
1:07.6	convince the Trump administration to draw down the strategic petroleum reserve to
1:12.1	try to keep prices down. The thing is, the Energy Information Administration said this week,
1:19.0	U.S. petroleum inventories are now as low as they have been since 2004. Marketplace's
1:26.2	Kelly Wells gets us going with what that might mean.
1:28.8	The U.S. is exporting more oil, but not because it's producing more oil.
1:33.2	We're just kind of pulling that out of our inventory and we're shipping it overseas.
1:37.9	Abie Rajendron with the Center for Energy Studies at the Baker Institute says exports from the U.S.
1:42.8	have tempered the global supply shortage
1:44.6	and actually kept prices relatively stable. But the U.S. can't continue to be backstop just through
1:51.6	inventories for too much longer. At this rate, analysts expect U.S. inventories to reach record lows
1:57.3	because last time they got this low in the mid-2000s, the U.S. wasn't even close to exporting the millions of daily oil barrels it does now.
2:05.8	It's really easy to say, well, we can just stop that. Well, we really can't.
2:10.2	Patrick DeHan, head of petroleum analysis at GasBuddy, says if we did stop exporting, oil companies would pretty much stop drilling.
2:17.6	You can't have a world in which the U.S. is the world's largest oil producer, and we keep all
	...

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