US oil data from the US Energy Information Administration for the week ending December 16th indicated that after a big drop in our oil imports and a big decrease in ​those mysterious ​oil supplies that could not be accounted for, we needed to pull oil out of our stored commercial crude supplies for the 5th time in 6 weeks, and for the 16th time in the past 35 weeks, despite another sizable release of oil from the SPR.