<This Week in Petroleum 10-31-07 The Oil Drum Are We in a Speculative Bubble with Regard to Oil Prices?>

17 comments on A Few Charts of the US Crude Oil Supply and Stocks Situation

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jteehan on October 31, 2007 - 6:43pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

I have a different interpretation.

The refineries appear to be breaking far more often since the post Katrina full throttle experiment wore everything out. If the utilization is down because the refinery is down, it doesn't support your conclusion of over capacity. It just means the refinery was down.

Unfortunately, unlike the NRC data, there isn't a site showing current operating levels and outages, so I can't prove my point.

Also, total combined stocks are way down at about 1.1 million barrels a week YOY and this would reaonably explain about a .5 to 1% drop in utilization over the course of the last 12 months. Again, my point is if stocks are down, it doesn't mean there is excess capacity. It just means less capacity was utilized.

I defer to your judgement if my conclusions seem unlikely.

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memmel on October 31, 2007 - 10:49pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

If you look at the graphs I posted I see no indication of this post Katrina full throttle effect. In fact refinery utilization never recovered after Katrina. We have had a excellent post that indicated Katrina probably masked the real peak in oil production. The simpler answer is we peaked in 2005 and refinery utilization has been decreasing since. Katrina just happened to hit during the peak year.

Looking at this.

http://www.petrostrategies.org/Graphs/Gasoline_Pump_Prices.htm

You could not pick out when Katrina happened.
In fact what we see is a obvious pattern that started after peak production in 2005.

It seems a lot of things contributed to Katrina seem to be a myth.

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jteehan on October 31, 2007 - 11:53pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

You changed the subject. Your showed a graph of prices. However, your original post was in the context of excess capacity and utilization and that was the basis of my discussion. Your price graph also doesn't support your excess capacity theory either or the price would be down noticeable.

If your chart were to extend into October, it would most certainly not show the usual September swoon in prices. Of course those prices would be even lower than usual if there was excess capacity.

In fact, it's clear to me were not even talking about the same thing. There is no excess capacity. Any oil finding economist could tell you that.

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memmel on November 1, 2007 - 1:34pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

Capacity graphs are below I did not want to repost you see the sharp drop right around Katrina and a rebound. Which is also by coincidence right around when the world peaked. The point of my price graph is the real world runs on oil products not crude oil. We see no indication that Katrina had any lasting effect on gasoline prices. Instead we are seeing a fairly obvious pattern forming post global peak.

Sorry but I knew I had posted the production graph already I did not want to repost.

Don't focus to much on month to month numbers they are not important for Peak oil we have to look at year long trends if possible I hesitate to use even six months of data for any sort of peak oil argument. Seasonal variation in oil usage is quite high so you really have to watch the trends.

Post 2005 we see that refinery utilization stays low prices for gasoline are volatile but high and it seems oil stocks are being gamed as part of hedging strategies. Given the consistent low utilization factors its fairly obvious that if our refineries where operating at capacity then we would have drawn down the oil that was imported over the last two years. In the case we seem to have that refinery utilization is low then its pretty obvious that crude stocks are being managed as part of a complex strategy to extract profits.

The price volatility is a classic symptom of peak. We can expect the the hedging by refiners will eventually fail and prices for crude and gasoline will soon start a large upward swing until we see serious demand destruction and refineries shutdown.

We have in my opinion one more downward swing on crude prices as the US economy falters but this will be irrelevant by next summer and we will move from peak volatility to post peak exponential increase sometime next summer. And it will be relentless until we some some real demand destruction in the more affluent nations. Assuming that crude does a drop down to around 70 a barrel later we will then see it rise from then on out past 150 a barrel and continue to rise close to 200 only when we hit 5 dollars a gallon plus for gasoline and finally get real demand destruction will we see a slowdown.

Read this paper closely.

http://www.cge.uevora.pt/aspo2005/abscom/Abstract_Lisbon_Bardi.pdf

If you look at prices we are now in the post peak volatility period but more chilling is the fact this occurred at 80% depletion which means we probably will only extract another 200GB of oil or six years at our current rate. Obviously the extraction rate will slow over the coming years but at best we probably have 10 years of reasonably high oil extraction rates left. Given all the other factors I'd be surprised if we make it five more years.

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17 comments on A Few Charts of the US Crude Oil Supply and Stocks Situation

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