Friday, January 15, 2010

New IEA Oil Market Report Out



First estimate of December global liquid fuels production. Looks like the recovery in global production continues apace:
Global supply rose 270 kb/d in December to 86.2 mb/d, on both higher OPEC and non-OPEC output. A reappraisal of Azerbaijan’s crude production outlook leads to a 150 kb/d revision for 2010 non-OPEC supply, to 51.5 mb/d. Non-OPEC output this year will grow 0.2 mb/d from a modestly-revised 51.3 mb/d in 2009, driven by biofuels and rising crude supply in Brazil, the FSU, Australia, Colombia and India.
I have updated my graph of global production above (click for huge version). A couple of minor tweaks also:
  • This also captures the EIA's October datapoint and latest revisions (see Gregor for commentary on the revisions)
  • The moving averages have been switched to 5 month moving averages, recursed once. I felt the previous 7 month ones were doing a poor job of capturing recent more rapid changes, and it was worth being a little lumpier in order to track better.
  • The oil prices have been rebased to Jan 2009 prices (CPI-U adjusted), and the right hand scale adjusted slightly to make the two curves not collide so much.
And here is the latest global production recovery trajectory. Convergence of slopes continues, and overall, we appear to be recovering at 3.8 ± 0.4 mbd/year.  That's about a 5% growth rate, which seems fairly remarkable, given the otherwise sluggish recovery at least in the OECD.



OPEC will be out with another data point next Tuesday for those of us who would like to obsess over such things...

2 comments:

  1. We are in a price band comparable to mid-2006, when we only had 1.45 mb/d of spare capacity; yet now EIA claims there is 4.36 mb/d of SC, and the IEA figure is even higher, with both due to rise in the coming year according to forecasts; so where is the surge of crude to tamp down prices? Or is $80/bbl the new $20/bbl?

    Bets that if we enter double dip recession territory there will be a chorus of demands that the market be flooded to bring prices down - stimulus free for the taking. Will be interesting to see if OPEC can deliver in such a situation.

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  2. KLR - I share your scepticism of that spare capacity estimate. At the same time, I think it probably is an important factor that OPEC price expectations have changed anchor level.

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