Focus On Fracking -- December 26, 2023

Locator: 46391FRACK.

Focus on fracking: link here.

• US oil production at a record high: US gasoline exports at a 12 month high; DUC well backlog falls to 4.7 months.
• Fudge factor: based on that reported & estimated data, the crude oil figures provided by the EIA for the week ending December 15th appear to indicate that our total working supply of oil from net imports, from transfers, and from oilfield production was 385,000 barrels per day less than what what was added to storage plus what our oil refineries reported they used during the week. 
• to account for that difference between the apparent supply of oil and the apparent disposition of it, the EIA just inserted a [ +385,000] barrel per day figure onto line 16 of the weekly U.S. Petroleum Balance Sheet in order to make the reported data for the 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.... 
• moreover, since 1,046,000 barrels of oil demand per day could not be unaccounted for in last week’s data, that means there was a 1,431,000 barrel per day difference between this week's oil balance sheet error and the EIA's crude oil balance sheet error from a week ago, and hence the changes to supply and demand from that week to this one that are indicated by this week's report are off by that much, and therefore useless​...