The EIA Misstatements Now Catching The Attention Of Mainstream Media -- July 1, 2023

Locator: 44856WTI. 

And so we begin.

Every week, for as long as I can remember, the author / writer / webmaster of "Focus On Fracking" has inserted the following (same) paragraph near the top of the blog, but simply updated the data each week (I broke the paragraph up int bite-size pieces):

So, based on that reported & estimated data, the crude oil figures provided by the EIA for the week ending June 16th appear to indicate that our total working supply of oil from net imports, from storage, and from oilfield production was 1,859,000 barrels per day less than what our oil refineries reported they used during the week…

To account for that obvious disparity between the apparent supply of oil and the apparent disposition of it, the EIA just inserted a [ +1,859.000 ] 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 was an error in the week’s oil supply & demand figures that we have just transcribed...

However, since most oil traders respond to these weekly EIA reports as if they were accurate, and since these weekly figures therefore 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 reliable 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)….(NB: there is also a more recent twitter thread from an EIA administrator addressing these errors, and what they hope to do about it).

I've highlighted that on a couple of occasions, but now "others" are finally seeing the same thing and starting to report it.

It has, all of a sudden, become a big and visible issue over at social media by some very respected writers for some very respected media outlets. 

The EIA has become quite egregious in some of their reporting. It clearly has "an agenda." At best, more and more folks won't trust the EIA data. At worst, this lack of trust and egregious reporting will lead to increased volatility in the price of oil.

For twenty years (or more), I've been waiting for a breakout in the price of oil and for oil demand to be a bigger issue than oil supply, but I've yet to see it.

Again, we are being told that the second half of 2023 will finally be the "year" that oil breaks out as global oil supply significantly "fails" to meet demand.

So, we'll see.

Over at twitter, the current state of affairs regarding the EIA reporting. Javier Blas is among the best analysts and among the most credible on twitter. One ignores him at one's own peril. At the link, it's an interesting thread.