It Gets Tedious; Disingenuous Reporting By The EIA -- December 17, 2019

Wow, I love this. Earlier today the EIA reported record US crude oil, liquid condensate, and natural gas prove reserves for 2018. I reported this earlier at this post.

The very first line of the EIA report:

Another year of stronger oil and natural gas prices increased 2018 oil and natural gas proved reserves in the United States to another all-time record level.

The EIA report also said this in the summary:

Proved reserves of crude oil in the United States increased 12%, from 39.2 billion barrels at year-end 2017 to 43.8 billion barrels at year-end 2018, setting another U.S. record for crude oil proved reserves. The previous record was set in 2017 (39.2 billion barrels).

So, in 2017 and 2018, the US set new all-time records for proved reserves of crude oil, liquid condensate and natural gas.

Trump was elected president in 2016 and he assumed the presidency in early 2017, remaining in office through 2018, and will probably be in office to the end of 2019 when another record will be set.

Of course, prior to his presidency we had this doofus (if you ever want to find this clip quickly, search "doofus"):

Doofus-in-Chief

We just can't drill our way to lower prices -- we also have to build pipelines. Gasoline is twice as expensive in California as it is in Texas (or so I'm told by my brother-in-law) -- 

This is what caught my interest: the all-time records set in 2017 and 2018 were a combination of a number of things which the EIA conveniently forgot to note. Most important was the favorable environment for the oil companies which was set by the commander-in-chief. One of the first things he did was clear the way for DAPL.

Of almost equal importance, of course, was the technology, skills, yada, yada, of US oil companies cracking the code to successfully produce shale oil.

Again, the very first line of the EIA report:

Another year of stronger oil and natural gas prices increased 2018 oil and natural gas proved reserves in the United States to another all-time record level.

In fact, crude oil and natural gas prices had nothing to do with record levels set in 2018. We don't need to go through that story, but this graphic pretty much says it all, which, by the way, was in the EIA report linked above:

 

It gets tedious.