The graph above shows Iranian oil production according to four data sources: the Oil and Gas Journal (but only updated through 2008), the International Energy Agency (IEA), the US Energy Information Agency (EIA), and the Joint Oil Data Initiative (JODI).
There is considerable dissension over what Iranian production has been doing. The Iranians themselves reported to JODI that their production fell sharply about 0.5mbd when OPEC decided to cut back production to support prices in the great recession. However, the US EIA and the IEA in Paris report that any cutback was non-existent (EIA) or small and uneven (IEA), with production recently presumably being pretty much Iranian capacity.
Since the current Iranian regime is clearly dishonest and corrupt about other matters (its nuclear facilities, its presidential elections), I'm inclined to believe the international agencies. Therefore, I wouldn't expect large increases in Iranian production any time soon.
I've always wondered why/how these data sources can differ so greatly. You posted about one such source over 5 years ago, Stuart: The Oil Drum | JODI Hall of Shame. That could as well be EIA, IEA, OPEC, O&GJ, or BP in that hall, of course.
ReplyDeleteEvery now and then I've seen some blatant editing in EIA data - once time I checked numbers on Venezuela for a spreadsheet of mine and they'd jumped 100 or 200 kb/d in the space of 6 months. WTF! Would perhaps be illuminating to archive data for a year and see what kind of !!! discrepancies like that pop up.
Apparently they also do a lot of double counting as noted here:
ReplyDelete"The biggest continuing over reporting is Iran, and the reason for that is Iran is unable to produce its quota, and they don't want the other members to observe that, and adjust their quota downward - so they fill the gap. It gets filled in two ways: one, for logistics reasons, they receive cross-border crude imports from Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, and they deliver an equivalent volume of crude at their offshore loading port at Kharg Island. So that's double counting. They import some products - again, for logistics reasons - from various neighboring countries, and that gets double reported. And whenever that's not enough, they report some of their gas liquids production - so that, routinely, Iran's production is accepted by everyone as approximately 4 million barrels a day, and in reality it's about 3.3 million."
In an article from H. Groppe
http://old.globalpublicmedia.com/transcripts/2891