Weekly Installment Of Focus On Fracking -- August 28, 2022

Focus on fracking: weekly installment.The lede:

• natural gas touches $10;
• US oil supplies at a 19-year low;
• SPR at a 37.5-year low after a record withdrawal.

The latest US oil supply and disposition data from the EIA:

US oil data from the US Energy Information Administration for the week ending August 19, 2022, showed that despite a record withdrawal of crude from the SPR, a drop in our oil exports, and a decrease in​ our​ refining, we had to pull oil out of our stored commercial crude supplies for the 4th time in 6 weeks, and for the 23rd time in the past 39 weeks, in part due to a big decrease in oil supplies that could not be accounted for.

Meanwhile, US oil refineries reported they were processing an average of 16,255,000 barrels of crude per day during the week ending August 19, 2022, an average of 168,000 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 1,625,000 barrels of oil per day were being pulled out of the supplies of oil stored in the US. 

So, based on that reported and estimated data, the crude oil figures from the EIA for the week ending August 19, 2022 appear to indicate that our total working supply of oil from net imports, from oilfield production, and from storage was 636,000 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 (+636,000) 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.