In response to yesterday's post, several commenters noted that there's an apparent discrepancy between the EIA numbers for oil import/exports, and the numbers in the BP Statistical Review of World Energy. The two sets of series are above, but in the BP case, imports and exports are identical to the barrel, suggesting they are deliberately harmonized, rather than being independent estimates.
The reason for the discrepancy becomes fairly clear if we look at oil exports from out of the United States. For 2007-2009, EIA has those at 27kbd, 29kbd, and 44kbd - very small numbers, reflecting the fact that the US is a major importer of crude oil, not an exporter. Presumably, there are a few wells somewhere that are easier to connect to a pipeline in Canada or Mexico than in the US, but that's about it.
However, the BP spreadsheet shows US exports for the same years as 1439, 1967, and 1916kbd. These are much larger numbers, and strongly suggest that the BP numbers include trade in oil products, not just crude oil itself. As Gregor McDonald noted recently, US exports of refined products are increasing recently as US consumers are having to conserve, and thus are not using all the products of American refineries, some of which are now being reexported elsewhere.
So presumably the BP numbers overall are higher because they include export of oil products, rather than just of crude oil. In some cases, this may be double counting (for example oil coming into the US and being reexported as refined diesel), but in other cases not (for example, Saudi Arabia in recent years has exported 1.2-1.4mbd of refined products, and those exports would be counted in the BP line and not the EIA line above (which was only for crude-and-condensate exports/imports).
At any rate, whichever way you measure it, all of these series show declines in the last couple of years.
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/taibblog/wikileaks-cables-show-speculators-behind-oil-bubble-20110526
ReplyDeleteStuart:
Gail of TOD has presented her opinion that the 2008 crash was due to high energy prices that rendered Americans unable to pay their mortgages.
I argued against that position at the time but it was hard to find evidence to support the view that cheap money and a wash of speculative capital may have been responsible to both the housing "boom" and the energy pricing "boom" that occured co-incident with one another. The Tabbi article above provides some evidence to support this view.
Cheers!
BP's numbers do include product exports. There's a table in the workbook showing that product export was 93% of total oil exports in 2008 and and 98% in 2009. Gasoline from the USA is imported into pretty well all of Canada except the Atlantic Provinces.
ReplyDeleteGreat article and nice graph. The graph shows import BP numbers are increases by yearly rather than import EIA. the BP numbers consist of business in oil products, not just raw oil on its own. The BP numbers overall are greater because they consist of trade of oil items, rather than just of raw oil. Country Overview
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