Focus On Fracking -- March 28, 2023

Link here.

Lede:

• biggest drop in gasoline supplies in 18 months;
• DUC well backlog at 4.9 months

That EIA fudge factor:

Meanwhile, US oil refineries reported they were processing an average of 15,376,000 barrels of crude per day during the week ending March 17th, an average of 21,000 fewer barrels per day than the amount of oil that our refineries processed during the prior week, while over the same period the EIA’s surveys indicated that an average of 160,000 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 provided by the EIA for the week ending March 17th appear to indicate that our total working supply of oil from net imports and from oilfield production was 1,996,000 barrels per day less than what was added to storage plus 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 [+1,996,000] 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 ... NB: there is also a more recent twitter thread from the EIA administrator addressing these erros, and what they hope to do about it.

There is so much more at the linked article.