Wednesday, June 16, 2010

US Crude Production

I was curious whether the Deepwater Horizon blowout/spill had caused any detectable drop in US crude oil production. Poking around the EIA website, it turns out that they have a weekly estimate of domestic field crude production (meaning, actual crude coming out of the ground, as opposed to refinery gains etc).  The full series begins in 1983, currently goes through the week of June 4th, and looks like this:


You can see the long slide (peak US oil production was back in 1970), and then the slide arrested from 2006 on, with even a slight recovery in production in 2008/2009, presumably as a result of the price spike in 2005-2008 promoting more drilling.

Focussing in just on the period since the beginning of 2005, this next chart shows a red line for the April 20th date of the Deepwater Horizon blowout:


Maybe that last little wiggle down has something to do with it, but who knows - really it's no larger a fluctuation than occurs all the time.  We'll have to wait until the Minerals Management Service releases May and June numbers for Gulf of Mexico production to be more certain - they are only up to March at present.

So, while the oil spill is certainly a massive regional environmental disaster, the impact on oil production is negligible so far.
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5 comments:

  1. MisterMooseJune 16, 2010 at 9:25 AM

    Do we know why there were the large downward spikes in late 2005 and again in late 2008? Were they related to general downturns in the broader economy?

    I am most concerned about the political ramifications of the BP leak. If Obama and the Democrats in Congress try to ram through some kind of cap and trade or carbon tax (don't let a good crisis go to waste...), we could see a huge, permanent decrease in domestic oil production. After Obama's speech last night, one of the talking heads pointed out that we are not running out of places to drill; rather, we are being prevented from drilling in many places where we know there is lots of oil.

    And, even if cap and trade fails, the 6-month moratorium on offshore drilling will effectively have a similar effect for years to come. Those oil rigs aren't going to hang around for six months when they could be earning their keep by drilling off Nigeria or Brazil.

    I've got a bad feeling about this...

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  2. Stuart StanifordJune 16, 2010 at 9:36 AM

    Mister Moose:

    The downtowns in 2005 and 2008 were due to hurricanes in the Gulf of Mexico (primarily Katrina and Rita in 2005, and Gustav in 2008).

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  3. DatamungerJune 16, 2010 at 10:58 AM

    The increase in 2009 was predicted by the EIA in their Short Term Energy Outlook for many months running in 2008. And they named the 2 sources of the main contribution to it....both deepwater plays: the Thunderhorse & Tahiti fields, 250K & 125K at max respectively.

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  4. Stuart StanifordJune 16, 2010 at 11:19 AM

    DM:

    I haven't specifically checked the STEOs, but my sense is that every AEO, the EIA always thinks US production is about to turn the corner and start increasing. Even a broken clock is right twice a day...

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  5. KLRJune 16, 2010 at 1:19 PM

    A chart of production gain/loss by PADD: http://i777.photobucket.com/albums/yy52/TheDudePeakOil/USProductionPADDsChangesMonthly2005.png?t=1276719415 The Bakken is a well know hot spot that has flattened out the US decline lately. Another contributor has been flat production in Texas, courtesy horizontal wells in the Permian Basin.

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