I've been a bit puzzled by the rather rapid rate at which global oil production is recovering - 3.8 ± 0.4 mbd/year - since last time I checked, US oil demand had barely started to recover at all. Where is the oil going?
As a first exploration of this, I looked at the EIA's consumption data, which currently goes through September 2009. They only have monthly data for the OECD countries. To give some orientation, here is the breakdown of consumption since the beginning of last year:
As you can see, as for global production, the low of OECD consumption was May of last year. If we look at changes since that month, for all the OECD countries and subgroupings for which the EIA has data, we get the following:
Overall, OECD demand has increased by two million barrels/day from May to September, which is certainly enough to account for the rise in global production. The bulk of this additional consumption occurred in Europe. However, the detailed pattern of consumption over time is all wrong, with almost all demand increase occurring between May and June, and then not much further rise by September, but with a big drop in August.
Anyone know what's up with that?
3 comments:
M Downey shows that cliff drop in Oil Number to Watch in 2010. Looks like they occasionally hit the deck for whatever reason. You'd have to break out their demand by sector to figure out what happened, perhaps stimulus hadn't kicked in. Or the cold snap increased demand for heating oil.
KLR - did you mean to link to a different article? That one concerns OPEC production rather than OECD consumption...
Oops - 2009 Oil Market Review as OPEC Meets I think it was a guest post on TOD.
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