Monday, December 21, 2009

Revised Recovery in Global Fuel Production




On Saturday, I posted a graph of the rate at which total global liquid fuel was recovering. I realized afterwards that the OPEC numbers had been revised since I first obtained them. I get those numbers by scraping them off the black line from this graph in the OPEC Monthly Oil Market Report.



I went back through this latest version and redid all the numbers for 2008 and 2009. It then became clear OPEC was now saying the trough month was May. That's also what the EIA thinks, though IEA believes it was March. At any rate, I took May as the starting point of the recovery for all the series and got the revised graph above.

The slopes now correspond to 2.3mbd/year (IEA), 4.3mbd/year (EIA), and 3.8mbd/year (OPEC). Obviously, there's a lot of uncertainty here, but it seems clear that the rate of bounceback in production is quite high.  If we extrapolate the trend so far, we'd be retesting the series highs sometime in 2010.

I will continue to track this going forward. Hopefully the situation will become clearer over time.

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