Liam Denning, Columnist

America's Gas-Pump Puzzle

Fuel demand is unusually weak, despite record driving in January.

March 31, 2017 at 7:33 PM UTC

Liam Denning is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering energy. A former banker, he edited the Wall Street Journal’s Heard on the Street column and wrote the Financial Times’s Lex column.

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The good news for oil bulls in the gasoline figures released Friday afternoon by the Department of Energy was that the U.S. really wasn't in a recession in January (actually, that's good news for all of us). The bad news is that the numbers were still surprisingly weak.

The DoE's "Petroleum Supply Monthly" report comes out at the end of each month with revised figures for U.S. oil supply and demand, with a two-month lag. So Friday's report had figures for January. As I wrote here, the less-reliable weekly estimates the DoE publishes had indicated an alarming drop in gasoline consumption (which accounts for about half of U.S. oil demand overall) earlier this year. In some weeks, gasoline demand seemed to be running 5 or 6 percent lower, year over year -- a drop usually associated with recessions or price spikes.1490985498976