Monday, September 13, 2010

Where is Oil Consumption Stagnating/Declining?


I have been tracking for several months the fact that global oil production seems to have stopped recovering, most recently analyzing the stagnation since February here.  Recall this graph:


showing that, following the decline associated with the Great Recession (July 2008 to spring 2009) there was a recovery through about February of this year, after which production has been flat.

This obviously raises questions about which countries are consuming less oil.  I initially looked at the EIA data (Table 1.7 of the International Petroleum Monthly), which currently has monthly data for the OECD through May (y-axis is thousands of barrels/day)


This shows that since the spring there has been several million barrels/day of lost demand split between Europe and "Other OECD" - comprising Japan, Korea, Australia, Canada, New Zealand.  This is more than enough to explain the flattening of the global production curve.  Meanwhile, US demand has been flattish - neither growing much nor shrinking much.

So the stagnation seems to be mainly coming from the non-US OECD.

5 comments:

Alexander Ac said...

This ise exactly what we would like climate change policies would do-but without loosing the jobs of course... Alex

Unknown said...

Well, very interesting...

One could look at it two ways - Europe is in much worse situation than US - which I personally doubt.

Or OECD customers have more options - possibilities to switch to other transport options - compare to US transport system where public transport and trains are less availabe IMHO...

Also it would be interesting to compare currency rate, it could be that with more streng dollar in recent months - and oil is still priced in US dollar - OECD customers were kind of priced out of market and reduced their demad - while US not

KLR said...

JODI has numbers through June. Diffs of average Jan-May from EIA range from .69 for USA to 231.23 for Canada. Average YOY diff in demand for March-June, data from JODI:

China 1491.47
United States 556.71
Brazil 249.05
Indonesia 233.45
Canada 233.07
Netherlands 161.2
India 148.83
Iraq 126.67
Mexico 91.62
Saudi Arabia 59.33
Chinese Taipei 45.39
Venezuela 26.5
Australia 15.89
Poland 10.86
Korea 6.83
France 5.13
Thailand 3.52
Japan 0.48
Germany -7.88
Turkey -11.68
Iran -12.33
Malaysia -21.78
Italy -23.71
Spain -28.66
Belgium -49.57
South Africa -55.01
United Kingdom -85.09
Egypt -459.63

Better formatted list and some comments on Brazil posted here at TOD.

Stuart Staniford said...

KLR - thanks! I somehow hadn't registered that JODI had consumption data.

Stuart Staniford said...

Hmmm - I'm not too sure about those JODI numbers. They are labelled "Refinery Input/Demand", rather than being final demand, and the pattern of them is very different than the EIA numbers.