Look at a longer time horizon. Big inventory build in November and December, as if big oil knew what was coming. Big oil may have been fearing things would go badly in Venezuela, in which case their inventory build would have been perfectly timed.

I mean, probably not. It's tempting to try to fit everything into a narrative around big splashy events, but that's not always what's going on. Global oil inventories had been growing and growing for quite a while. Global oil stocks hit four year highs in October, before there was any visible movement towards Venezuela - and everywhere, not just in the U.S.:

iea.org - Oil market report december

...plus Venezuela is a tiny little bit of the oil market. Oil prices didn't really move much around the Venezuela operation. So it's probably just that macro forces had been leading to a big build up of oil inventories over the latter half of 2025 generally - not some conspiratorial machinations by Big Oil.

As for current oil production, we're still producing more oil than we did last year - or ever apart from the late 2025 peaks. So we're still pumping a shirt-ton. There's been a slight - less than 1.5% - reduction in output since the war started - but overall, we're still pumping like gangbusters. The slight dip might just be noise, or a continuation of the reduction of production in response to the oil glut from earlier in the year.

Or it might be a response to market conditions. Now's probably not a time when we need a lot of physical oil here in the United States. Oil is needed in Europe and Asia, but not particularly here. Meanwhile, the U.S. is releasing many millions of barrels from the SPD in an effort to keep prices in check, which is a lot of extra oil physically here in the U.S. High prices will cause some short term demand destruction, everywhere - so you end up with less U.S. demand for oil. It will take some time for all the tanker routes and delivery systems to get rerouted, especially since some tankers are "locked in" inside the Persian Gulf for now. So it makes perfect sense that oil producers might shave a teeny-tiny bit off of production for the time being.