Focus On Fracking -- July 24, 2022

Link here.

Lede:

US oil supplies at new 18 year low, SPR at a 37 year low; DUC wells at an all time low, DUC backlog at 4.4 months. 

Always my favorite section:

The Latest US Oil Supply and Disposition Data from the EIA US oil data from the US Energy Information Administration for the week ending July 15th indicated that despite another large oil withdrawal from the SPR and a sizable increase in oil supplies that could not be accounted for​, ​we needed to withdraw oil from our stored commercial crude supplies for the 3rd time in 7 weeks, and for the 20th time over the past 34 weeks, ​mostly because of a big increase in our oil exports…our imports of crude oil fell by an average of 156,000 barrels per day to an average of 6,519,000 barrels per day, after falling by an average of 164,000 barrels per day during the prior week, while our exports of crude oil rose by 735,000 barrels per day to 3,759,000 barrels per day, which meant that our trade in oil worked out to a net import average of 2,760,000 barrels of oil per day during the week ending July 15th, 891,000 fewer barrels per day than the net of our imports minus our exports during the prior week…over the same period, production of crude from US wells was reportedly 100,000 barrels per day lower at 11,900,000 barrels per day, and hence our daily supply of oil from the net of our international trade in oil and from domestic well production appears to have totaled an average of 14,660,000 barrels per day during the July 15th reporting week…

Meanwhile, US oil refineries reported they were processing an average of 16,319,000 barrels of crude per day during the week ending July 15th, an average of 321,000 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 778,000 barrels of oil per day were being pulled out of 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 15th appear to indicate that our total working supply of oil from net imports, from oilfield production, and from storage was 881,000 barrels per day less than 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 (+881,000) 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)….