EIA's petroleum page now carries a newsroom warning, because the agency says it no longer publishes This Week in Petroleum and directs readers to current data elsewhere on the site, especially the Weekly Petroleum Status Report. [1]

That sounds like housekeeping until Hormuz returns to the front page, since Monday's paper used EIA's Hormuz baseline to explain why passage rules mattered for roughly 21 million barrels a day of petroleum liquids, while Tuesday's source note says the next oil article should not lazily cite a discontinued weekly product as if it were today's federal tape. [1]

The distinction matters because energy writing has a habit of turning agency pages into talismans: a reader sees EIA and assumes freshness, but a stale product can preserve a true structural claim while failing as a current market receipt, and Hormuz baseline work, inventory work, price work, and weekly analysis are not interchangeable. [1]

The online version of the oil story asks whether the market should panic or relax, but the better first question is where the data came from, because inventories need the active inventory report, structural Hormuz claims can use the baseline, and old weekly commentary cannot be treated as today's evidence. [1]

This is not a grand energy event but a source-discipline brief, and in a chokepoint week a discontinued EIA page is still useful because the agency is quietly reminding everyone that method is part of the fact. [1]

-- HENDRIK VAN DER BERG, Brussels