Lede:
Strategic Petroleum Reserve at a 37-year low; oil rigs fall by most in 25 months, natural gas rigs at a 35 month high.
EIA:
US oil data from the US Energy Information Administration for the week ending July 29th indicated that after a jump in our oil imports, a drop in our oil exports, and another big withdrawal of crude from the SPR, we were able to add oil to our stored commercial crude supplies for the 3rd time in 7 weeks, and for the 15th time in the past 36 weeks.
Our imports of crude oil rose by an average of 1,178,000 barrels per day to a 2 year high of 7,342,000 barrels per day, after falling by an average of 355,000 barrels per day during the prior week, while our exports of crude oil fell by 1,036,000 barrels per day to 3,512,000 barrels per day, which meant that our trade in oil worked out to a net import average of 3,830,000 barrels of oil per day during the week ending July 29th, 2,214,000 more 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 unchanged at 12,100,000 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 15,930,000 barrels per day during the July 29th reporting week.
Meanwhile, US oil refineries reported they were processing an average of 15,853,000 barrels of crude per day during the week ending July 29th, an average of 174,000 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 32,000 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 29th appear to indicate that our total working supply of oil from net imports, from oilfield production, and from storage was 109,000 barrels per day more 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 (-109,000) 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...
... moreover, since last week’s EIA fudge factor was at (+864,000) barrels per day, that means there was a 973,000 barrel per day difference between this week's balance sheet error and the EIA's crude oil balance sheet error from a week ago, and hence the week over week supply and demand changes indicated by this week's report are completely worthless....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).
