Reader's Comments On Announcement That US Is Net Exporter Of Oil For First Time In 75 Years -- December 6, 2018

A reader provided an assessment of the my exuberant enthusiasm regarding the announcement that the US has become a net exporter of oil for the first time 75 years. With minimal editing:

The weekly petroleum report showed the US as a net exporter of crude and products for the first time since the 1940s.

See this link: https://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/hist/LeafHandler.ashx?n=PET&s=WTTNTUS2&f=W.

At the bottom, you can see that "net imports" turned negative, at 0.2 million bpd. Yes. "negative imports" means EXPORTS.

Several articles on this as well (Bloomberg, Reuters, Financial Times, etc.)

Now the caveats:

Numbers bounce around a lot. We have been running about 2.5 million bopd net imports. So, don't expect to average net exports in the near future.

While production is rising, the main thing that drove the number to turn into net exports was that we had low net imports. This can vary a lot just based on individual ship deliveries. We typically have 2-3 crude supertankers come in per week and it looks like we had none the last week reported. This is just chance and will change soon.

The weeklies are much less accurate then the monthlies (which lag couple months).

The number is not just crude oil, but crude AND PRODUCTS. This includes both diesel and the like as well as most NGLs (propane, mostly).

All that said...crude imports have been dropping for a while now. We were 12 million bpd net imports (including products) in 2005. We've been moving closer and closer to net exports. Not yet there in terms of average. But it was inevitibale that we would get an individual data point showing net export. And there you are.

Paging Art Berman..