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The oil market is deceptively calm. Below the apparent tranquility lies an underappreciated transformation that has slowly reshaped the market over the last 25 years — because the arrival of China and India as big consumers hasn’t just given an enormous boost to demand, it’s also altered the market’s seasonality. And that matters a lot this year.

Until recently, global oil demand peaked every year with the arrival of the Northern Hemisphere’s winter. As temperatures dropped from October onward, heating oil and kerosene consumption spiked from the US to Germany to Japan. Hence, as recently as 2014, the fourth quarter still marked the annual high for crude demand and, typically, prices. Since then, the seasonality has flipped: Now, the third quarter sees higher demand and prices.

The shift means the market is now at its tightest from July to September, rather than October to December. While one-time events can still have an effect — the 2008 global financial crisis, for example, or the Covid-19 pandemic that started in early 2020 — looking over a long enough timescale reveals the change clearly. Because it happened incrementally over a quarter of a century, it often doesn’t get the attention it deserves. 

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