The biggest question in the oil market is whether some of the biggest oil producers in the world will follow through with pledged output cuts -- causing the global oil market to tighten.

2018 was a big year for Ursa!

Early in the year we launched our Oil Storage product for all regions in the world, helping us provide the best-in-class global dataset of the world's crude oil supply. We also launched our Ursa Data Portal, a one-stop shop for users to quickly perform custom analyses of the areas that are most important to them in an interactive and beautiful page. Throughout the year we've also made innumerable enhancements to strengthen our core and future offerings.

US oil inventories provide fundamental insight. Comparing stocks against the five-year average was part of the analysis, but historic builds have distorted that figure for the time being.

Back in August, this blog shortlisted the Permian Basin bottleneck as a candidate for story-of-the-year in the oil market. With 2018 drawing to a close, we think this prediction has held up pretty well.

A major issue lurking in the background came to the fore, which was the pipeline capacity -- or lack thereof -- connecting the Permian with Cushing, Oklahoma and Houston.

In the oil market, no country is an island. A supply disruption one place can have ramifications far away.

Take the recent shutdown of an oilfield in southwestern Libya and why that might matter in Primorsk, Russia or Ceyhan, Turkey.

On December 9, an armed group seized control of the Sharara oilfield (315,000 barrels per day), Libya’s largest.

When the Shanghai International Energy Exchange launched a crude futures contract back in March the oil market kept close tabs on its development.

Would China achieve its goal of establishing the world’s third crude benchmark? The other two being Brent and WTI. Or would the effort fizzle?

Cushing, Oklahoma has been the center of the US oil pricing universe since 1983 when the New York Mercantile Exchange (NYMEX) began trading a crude futures contract and selected Cushing as the delivery point.

But the transformation of the US Gulf Coast into a major oil export hub has generated lots of debate about the existing pricing system. Could Cushing's decades-long run soon be over?

Leveraging our deep expertise in satellite radar imagery, Ursa is able to provide reliable measurements - not extrapolations - across global supply chains day or night regardless of clouds or fog.

The US renewal of sanctions against Iran, effective Monday, will keep the market’s focus on the the impact that Washington’s efforts to penalize Tehran are having on the global oil market.

There have already been significant shifts in flows. One example is Iran boosting crude exports to the Chinese port of Dalian where bonded tanks are located.

Ursa's weekly crude inventory data for Cushing has a strong correlation to EIA's weekly data for this location. This complementary white paper demonstrates the correlation and reliability of Ursa's data, which comes out days ahead of EIA data.