Posted on 09/03/2014 5:22:26 AM PDT by thackney
We hadn’t written about the monthly EIA statistics on US oil supply and demand for a while because they’d gotten kind of dull. The big movements recorded month after month, particularly in product export growth and net import dependence, had fallen into a bit of a predictable range.
That changed in June. The EIA released numbers from that month today.
US petroleum import dependence in June dropped to 4.659 million b/d. That’s only the second time in the post-shale era that number had been less than 5 million b/d. And the last time the US recorded a number that low was back in 1986. But not all import dependence is equal; the US certainly would view Canada or Mexico as a supplier less prone to disruption than many other countries. So once you take away US net import dependence with Canada, that number slips to 2.282 million b/d. Take away Mexico and you’re down to 1.962 million b/d. Those numbers are easily the lowest ever recorded by the EIA. So in essence, that 1.962 million b/d of net import dependence is the figure for the rest of the world outside North America. In 2005, that US net import dependence figure after Canada and Mexico were taken out regularly recorded numbers in excess of 9 million b/d.
The main reason for that? US crude oil exports to Canada were 384,000 b/d. Total crude exports were 396,000 b/d after the EIA somehow recorded 6,000 b/d going to Singapore and 5,000 b/d to Switzerland. That total amount has only been exceeded once in history: March 1957, when exports spiked to 455,000 b/d. (Economist Phil Verleger wrote in to note that an earlier post that questioned what might have happened in March 1957 to spur such a surge overlooked the fact that it was the occasion of the Suez Canal crisis.) We know that by rail or by ship, the US is sending an increasing amount of crude oil exports to Canada, which faces far more limited US export restrictions. In fact, the surge may be a problem for a significant new pipeline project designed to get Canadian oil out of Alberta, particularly if Keystone XL is blocked; Canada’s biggest newspaper wrote about the issue yesterday.
Other export statistics were strong, but few records were recorded. Total products exports were 2.733 million b/d; that’s actually the second-lowest figure this year. Distillate exports were strong at 964,000 b/d, but the record is 1.131 million b/d, set last September. LPG exports at 683,000 b/d were the third-highest ever, but a long way from May’s record of 727,000 b/d.
The talk through much of late last year and into this year was the strong increase in demand being recorded in the US. But the EIA data isn’t showing that trend—if it ever was one—continuing. Products supplies were 18.833 million b/d; that’s a whopping 27,000 b/d more than June 2013. In June 2010, when the economy was in far worse shape, products supplied were 19.537 million b/d. And gasoline consumption was just 9.034 million b/d, down slightly from the corresponding month a year ago. With Chinese demand flat, where’s the increase in demand going to come from to drive prices higher?
North Dakota’s 1.093 million b/d crude production was a record. Texas produced 3.074 million b/d, a post-shale record. Federal offshore production of 1.43 million b/d remains below the levels in place when the Macondo moratorium was put in place in April 2010. It was 1.531 million b/d in May of that year.
This is good news.
Seemed doubtful at first, but now it's looking like another datum for the "why everything's great" list. My concern was that usually energy use is proportional to general economic health and that falling imports really just meant a falling economy. The whole picture is somewhat more upbeat, that while total U.S. energy use has been hit by the '09 disaster, over the years meeting this need has seen a solid shift from foreign to domestic production.
iirc Utah has even bigger shale/oil deposits that were put on hold in the '90's when Clinton designated the area as a national park.
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