Has OECD Demand Started to Recover?

Probably not quite, it looks like.

As part of charting the dynamics of OECD oil demand recovery, I wanted to see the recent history, and in particular figure out how far the recovery had gone, now that most observers feel the recession is over. Answer: not started!

Here's the basic data for OECD consumption from 2001 on, through August 2009 (which is when both the EIA and IEA monthly series stop).

If you look at the year-over-year change in total OECD oil demand (again through Aug 2009), you get this:

Still quite negative in August. To bring the picture up to date, I looked at the EIA's weekly refinery production numbers for the United States only, which are available through this week. Here's the year over year change in those numbers:

Ignore the spikes which are due to outages. The important point is this line is not back to zero yet either, though it's clearly headed in that direction. So we are only just now reaching the point of OECD oil demand starting to stabilize.

Finally: have a deadline at work at the moment, so blogging is a little ragged - apologies.