The Weekly EIA US Oil Supply "Adjustment" -- September 9, 2023

Locator: 45579OIL.

This started out as clickbait -- not mine, but clickbait over on twitter, but I "fell for it," but was justly rewarded, though the answer is still out there.

It has to do with something the writer of "Focus on Fracking" has noted for a very, very, very long time. In fact I think he brought it to light when the EIA seemed to be purposely "hiding" it. 

It has to do with "unaccounted-for oil" in the US.

After subtracting all the oil that refiners use for the week from the total amount of oil that enters the system, the delta should be zero: total amount of oil "in" should equal total amount of oil "out."

See this "standard" paragraph over at "Focus on Fracking":

Meanwhile, US oil refineries reported they were processing an average of 16,603,000 barrels of crude per day during the week ending August 25th, an average of 173,000 fewer barrels per day than the amount of oil that our refineries were processing during the prior week, while over the same period the EIA’s surveys indicated that an average of 1,427,000 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 provided by the EIA for the week ending August 25th appear to indicate that our total working supply of oil from net imports, from oilfield production, and from storage was 287,000 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 [ +287,000 ] 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 of that magnitude in the week’s oil supply & demand figures that we have just transcribed.... 

Apparently the EIA has been aware of this discrepancy for quite some time but has done little to sort it out.

So, today, over at twitter, this clickbait:

I was interested in the second part of that note, the "oil adjustment issue."

Clicking on that link, led to more clickbait:

And then to yet another link. No screenshot, but so far in this post, that is the most important article.

Anyway, that's all prelude to what really caught my attention.

The adjustment in the most recent posting of "Focus on Fracking," as noted was 287,000 bopd. Big, small, who knows, but it was 287,000 bopd.

But just after that posting, the most recent EIA adjustment data was posted.

Wow.

At that link, go to "Table 2, US Petroleum Balance Sheet" and click on the pdf icon to the far right.

Look at that huge jump. From 287,000 bopd last week to the new number this week: 1,198,000 bopd.

To put that in perspective, that's about how much the Bakken produces, about 1.1 million bopd and that's the amount for which the EIA cannot account.

Wow, and I used to worry about balancing / reconciling my checkbook every month when it was off by a penny. LOL.