Last Friday’s G7 pledge to release 100 million barrels of crude and diesel from emergency stocks over four months looked like a forceful response to record diesel prices. JPMorgan’s commodities team says the market shouldn’t read too much into the headline number.In a note out this week titled “Counted but not delivered,” Natasha Kaneva and colleagues write that the package explicitly counts previously fulfilled commitments and, by their reading, “does not represent 100 million barrels of new intervention.”The math: IEA members committed 412 million barrels in March. About 321 million have already gone out, leaving roughly 91 million outstanding. That means much of Friday’s announcement was simply the completion of the March release, including the remaining 40 million barrels from the US SPR that are already scheduled through December. What’s different is the tilt toward diesel, with a heavy frontloading in the first 20 days.Plenty is still undecided. The G7 didn’t say how the release splits between crude and products, or which countries are contributing. Earlier talks centred on a 50/50 split. The details should come at the IEA governing board meeting on October 14-15.Europe is the elephant in the room:European countries committed 108 million barrels in March (34m crude, 73m products)JPM estimates only about 16m barrels of diesel, 17m of gasoline, 10m of fuel oil and 12m of other products have actually been releasedLittle or no European crude appears to have been releasedEurope holds roughly 377 million barrels of emergency diesel, more than 3x the 106 million held in the USGermany (64m) and France (61m) alone outnumber the entire US stockpileYet Europe and the US have each released only about 16m barrels of diesel since the war beganMeanwhile, the US has been doing the heavy lifting through the transatlantic arb. US diesel shipments to Europe went from 200-250 kbd before the war to around 400 kbd in July and nearly 500 kbd in August, draining US inventories.On global oil stocks, a full release would take inventories from about 7.9 billion barrels to 7.8 billion by January. That’s a decade low but still roughly 150 million barrels above JPM’s stress threshold. Diesel is tighter. OECD diesel inventories would fall to about 504 million barrels, a two-decade low and below the bank’s 529 million stress level. That works out to around 39 days of demand cover, slightly below the September 2022 low of 40 days.If Europe takes on about 40 million barrels of the diesel release and spreads it over 60 days, that’s about 660 kbd, equal to roughly 57% of Europe’s current diesel imports. That should ease prompt tightness and narrow the arb.The closing line puts it well: “the constraint is not the availability of emergency barrels, but governments’ willingness to deploy them.”Brent daily:Update: Right on cue, Trump says there's a "big announcement" coming up on diesel, hiting at that Oct 14-15 meeting. This article was written by Adam Button at investinglive.com.