Focus On Fracking -- July 10, 2022

Wow, this caught me by surprise.

"Focus on Fracking" has already been posted. 

The lede:

• Strategic Petroleum Reserve at a 36½ year low; total oil + oil products supplies at a 13½ year low.

The following is a common theme in "Focus on Fracking" and one which is quite entertaining, for lack of a better word:

Meanwhile, US oil refineries reported they were processing an average of 16,438,000 barrels of crude per day during the week ending July 1st, an average of 228,000 fewer barrels per day than the amount of oil than our refineries processed during the prior week, while over the same period the EIA’s surveys indicated that a net average of 342,000 barrels of oil per day were being added to the supplies of oil stored in the US.... 

.... so based on that reported & estimated data, the crude oil figures from the EIA for the week ending July 1st appear to indicate that our total working supply of oil from net imports and from oilfield production was 453,000 barrels per day less than what was added to storage plus what our oil refineries reported they used during the week… 

... to account for that disparity between the apparent supply of oil and the apparent disposition of it, the EIA just inserted a (+453,000) barrel per day figure onto line 13 of the weekly U.S. Petroleum Balance Sheet in order to make the reported data for the daily supply of oil and for the consumption of it balance out, a fudge factor that they label in their footnotes as “unaccounted for crude oil,” thus suggesting there must have been an omission or error of that magnitude in this week’s oil supply & demand figures that we have just transcribed.... 

... however, since most everyone treats these weekly EIA reports as gospel, and since these figures often drive oil pricing, and hence decisions to drill or complete oil wells, we’ll continue to report this data just as it's published, and just as it's watched & believed to be reasonably accurate by most everyone in the industry...(for more on how this weekly oil data is gathered, and the possible reasons for that “unaccounted for” oil, see this EIA explainer)….