EIA Short-Term Energy Outlook (STEO)

Oil & Gas Refining & Marketing - the baseline everyone else argues with. The Short-Term Energy Outlook is the U.S. Energy Information Administration's standing forecast of energy supply, demand and prices, and it occupies a peculiar position in refining and marketing: rarely the last word, always the first number on the whiteboard. Each edition carries roughly two historical years plus monthly projections through the end of the calendar year after next - about sixteen to seventeen months of forward visibility. The August 2026 edition spans 2024 through 2027.

The span is wider than the oil patch alone. Global oil market assumptions sit beside Brent and WTI price paths; world and non-OPEC production and consumption roll into US petroleum and hydrocarbon gas liquids balances, including refinery input and utilization; regional motor gasoline prices and inventories carry PADD-level detail; biofuels, natural gas, electricity, coal, macroeconomic indicators and drilling productivity round out the frame.

Twenty-eight tables, roughly 140 to 175 rows apiece, each row keyed by a series mnemonic - BREPUUS for Brent spot, DSWHUUS_$ for wholesale diesel - and a dedicated cross-edition comparison isolates what moved, so a revision is legible as data rather than rumor. An archive of past editions reaches back to 1983. Get a sample of this dataset cut to the series and regions you actually model.

Four cuts of one edition, straight from the tables:

table     : Table 2. Energy Prices
series_id : BREPUUS          row_label : Brent Spot Average
2024 : 81   2025 : 69   2026_proj : 87   2027_proj : 69    ($/bbl)

table     : Table 2. Energy Prices
series_id : DSWHUUS_$        row_label : Wholesale Diesel Price ($/gal)
2026_proj : 3.37   2027_proj : 2.62

table     : Overview
row_label : U.S. crude oil production (million barrels per day)
2024 : 13.2 2025 : 13.6  2026_proj : 13.8  2027_proj : 14.2

table     : Notable Forecast Changes (August 2026 vs July 2026)
row_label : Wholesale gasoline price ($/gal)
current_2026 : 2.91   previous_2026 : 2.75   change : +5.9%

Read the first block and the anatomy is visible: four annual columns, two of them history and two of them projection, so observed and forecast share a single row and never need reconciling downstream. Read the third and US crude production walks from 13.2 to a projected 14.2 million barrels per day in four numbers. Read the fourth and the interesting thing becomes the revision itself - the 2026 wholesale gasoline view moving from $2.75 to $2.91 a gallon between editions is exactly the series a marketing desk wants as a time series, not as a footnote. The rows above are illustrative of the delivered shape; the complete series set for your named mnemonics arrives with the sample.

Five working fields carry every series, each definition checked against the source documentation during the August 2026 research pass and marked verified. Identification comes first - the series mnemonic and its human-readable label - then the period column, then the value in whatever unit the table header declares, then the forecast completion date that stamps every row with its edition. Because the same five-field shape repeats across all twenty-eight tables, a Brent spot path and a PADD gasoline inventory load into one table without reshaping.

The dictionary below is the verified core. Edition-level companion material - chart-gallery figures, cross-edition revision panels, unit metadata - folds out on request rather than being promised blind.

• Geo: World, OPEC and non-OPEC aggregates alongside United States national series, with PADD-level regional detail on prices and inventories - five districts, one schema
• Temporal: Roughly two historical years plus monthly projections through the end of the following calendar year (August 2026 edition covers 2024-2027); the edition archive reaches back to 1983
• Granularity: Monthly and annual periods, national and regional cuts, one row per series per period

That combination - global markers, national balances, district-level prices - is why teams building on a refinery throughput dataset start here for the forward view before pairing it with realized-flow sources. Against the wider catalog - average quality score 7.81 across 1,744 datasets - this record scores 9/10, carried by verified field definitions and complete forecast-horizon coverage.

API, files, or your warehouse. Daily, weekly, or hourly.

Pick the series you need - the Brent and WTI paths, refinery input and utilization, the PADD price sets, the inventory lines - pick the cadence, pick the landing zone. Every edition arrives parsed into the same five-field row shape whether it lands in Snowflake, BigQuery or Redshift or as flat files sized for an overnight load, so the August-over-July revision is a diff query rather than a re-read of twenty-eight sheets.

Every delivery ships with the full field dictionary, validation rows keyed to your named series, and a forecast-completion date on each record so cross-edition joins resolve cleanly. The sample comes first: the series list, history depth and cadence are settled facts before any commitment.

• Valuation and spread anchoring - the Brent and WTI paths and the crack-relevant wholesale product prices give margin models a common baseline; see our investors quants use cases page.
• Demand sizing and strategy - world and US consumption projections put growth claims in units before a strategy deck commits to them; the workflow appears on our market researchers use cases page.
• Backtesting and forecasting - history and projection in one row makes realized-versus-forecast error panels a join instead of a project; more on our data scientists use cases page.
• Refinery balance monitoring - input and utilization projections against capacity plans show where run-rate assumptions get thin.
• Planning dashboards and alerting - revision rows surface within a delivery cycle when the baseline moves under a plan; setup detail sits on our developers builders use cases page.

Investors and quant researchers get the consensus price and balance path under every refining and marketing thesis - history and projection in one row, ready for spread and scenario work (relevance 3 of 3); see investors quants use cases. Data scientists and ML engineers get verified definitions and a forecast-completion date on every record, so realized-versus-forecast panels need no provenance archaeology (3 of 3); see data scientists use cases. Market researchers and strategy teams size demand and price environments from consumption and regional price projections (2 of 3); see market researchers use cases. Refiners and fuel marketers read the refinery-balance and wholesale-price lines against their own footprint. Developers and analytics builders wire the series into planning dashboards where the baseline moving is an event worth paging on (builders' use cases).

• EIA Petroleum & Other Liquids Data Portal - the realized-price and flow ledger this forecast projects forward; pair the two and history meets projection in one panel.
• EIA International Energy Statistics - the observed counterpart to the STEO's international projections; the head-to-head lives at this comparison.
• EU Weekly Oil Bulletin - weekly European pump and wholesale prices, the transatlantic complement to the STEO's US price detail.
• GasBuddy station-level fuel prices - retail granularity the STEO's regional averages deliberately abstract away.
• Baker Hughes Rig Count - where the drilling-productivity assumptions meet rig reality, week by week.

Three glossary notes sharpen the vocabulary before you commit: what short-term energy outlook projections actually contain, how the PADD districts organize the regional price detail, and what counts as refinery throughput in the balance tables. For the head-to-head on pipeline-side capacity, see STEO vs Canada Energy Regulator throughput. The publisher profile behind the record is the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA).