Highlights Of This Week's Petroleum Report; Obama Halts Oil Production Off-Shore -- But We Already Knew That; The Red Queen Effect -- If You Don't Drill, Oil Production Depletes

Highlights of this week's petroleum report (some rounding):

• average refinery input: increased by 276,000 bopd (to 15.6 million bopd)
• refineries operated at 89% capacity
• gasoline production decreased slightly last week;
• oil imports increased by 1 million bbls last week, averaging 8.3 million bopd
•  the previous four weeks, imports average 7.5 million bopd (only 4% less than last year)
• total US crude oil inventories (including SPR) increased by 10 million bbls (to 394 million bbls)
• crude oil inventories are above average range for this time of year
• total gasoline inventories decreased slightly; near the lower limit of the average range
• propane/propylene rose slightly, but near lower limit of the average range

WTI: $103.68 ($2.52 over last week's price; $12.45 above a year ago).

Average retail gasoline price is about 10 cents more than last year, but it has increased for ten weeks in a row.

Bottom line: importing more oil (significant increase) but refinery input increase minimal; refineries below 90% capacity; inventories increasing slightly; gasoline demand increasing; gasoline inventories near lower limit of the average range; price of gasoline trending up, but not significantly higher than one year ago.

With refineries operating at less than 90% capacity, imports increasing, and gasoline inventories barely keeping up, it suggests that refineries are "seeing" "wrong type" of oil.

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Daily Caller is reporting:

Oil and gas production has stalled on federal lands for the third year in a row under the Obama administration, despite booming energy production on private and state lands, according to a new government report.

The Congressional Research Service (CRS) says that the share of oil and gas production coming from federal lands have plummeted from 2009 to 2013. Oil production on federal lands fell by 11 percent over this time period and natural gas production fell by 28 percent.

Federal onshore oil production fell for the third year in a row, while offshore oil production increased slightly — just enough to increase total oil production by 15,300 barrels per day in 2013 above 2012 levels.

But total federal oil production is still 316,800 barrels per day below 2010 levels of 1,975,100 barrels per day. The energy industry and federal lawmakers have long criticized the Obama administration for saddling energy producers with lengthy permitting times and environmental review processes.

“The CRS report clearly shows that where the federal government has the most control, on federal lands, it is suppressing development of the energy that all Americans own while preventing job creation and economic prosperity,” said Tim Wigley, president of pro-drilling Western Energy Alliance.

The share of U.S. oil production on federal lands has fallen to a five-year low, according to CRS, from 33.8 percent in 2009 to only 23 percent last year. The share of natural gas production on federal lands has also reached a five-year low of 15.2 percent last year — down from 24.9 percent in 2009.

If someone says their automobile has "stalled," it means one thing to me: it has stopped. In this case, under this administration, off-shore oil production has stalled for the third year in a row. 

So?

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A Note To The Granddaughters

In the second or third episode of "Cosmos," the narrative included a reference to Joseph von Fraunhofer.

On page 35 of Louisa Gilder's book:

... in the mid-eighteenth century, an inquisitive Scotsman, Thomas Melvill, burned table salt (sodium) and looked through a prism at the light produced, as Isaac Newton had once looked through a prism at white light and seen the rainbow spectrum. Melvill did not see a rainbow spectrum: he saw only a pair of yellow-orange stripes, surrounded by darkness.

Sixty-two years later, Joseph von Fraunhofer looked through a prism at the sun while calibrating surveying lenses for a military supply company. He noticed for the first time that there were dark lines across Newton's rainbow spectrum. The rainbow was, in fact, missing two chunks of warm yellow -- as if it were the salt spectrum turned inside out.

This coincidence went unexplored for almost half a century until Gustav Kirchhoff, a dapper little physicist who walked about the medieval halls of the University of Heidelberg on crutches, deduced why that chunk of yellow was missing: it had been absorbed by the sodium gas swirling about the sun. 

He was working with Robert Bunsen.

So, when you look at the light, through a prism, coming from the sun, you will not see the two yellow/orange lines one sees in the rainbow. Those yellow/orange "lines" are absorbed by sodium gas. 

At about that time, Bunsen and Kirchhof (or Kirchhof and Bunsen) discovered the new element, cesium, which they named. Cesium is one of only five liquid metals at room temperature: cesium, mercury, francium, gallium, and rubidium.

Interestingly enough, and I knew I could eventually get back to the Bakken if I read long enough, according to wiki: since the 1990s, the largest application of the cesium has been as caesium formate for drilling fluids.