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Some one over at R Squared’s blog is insisting that gasoline demand was down in 2007 and also in 2008.
Here is the data from EIA Average annual weekly demand in barrels per day.
Y 2000 8433
Y 2001 8547
Y 2002 8764
Y 2003 8881
Y 2004 9067
Y 2005 9149
Y 2006 9282
Y 2007 9355
Y 2007 9090
Y 2008 9128
Also avg. demand is up for first three weeks of 2008.
Avg. demand was down only in the past week and that was no doubt due to whether.
Benny needs to tell us from where he gets his data.
Maybe he's confused. There have been a lot of articles about how demand is slowing. The increase is smaller than expected, given the increase in population, etc.
You know, kind of like the way Congress cuts spending. They don't actually reduce anything, they just cut future increases.
It should have read:
Avg. demand was down only in the past week (Y on Y) and that was no doubt due to whether.
[..] and that was no doubt due to whether.
whether?
Or "weather"?
Demand increase is slowing. or we are on a demand plateau...
Dipchip - I have been thinking about your propane comment from Thurs. Can you link the data you are using?
EIA clearly is indicating we are WAY below 2006. 15.6% as of the 18th. So, seasonal draws accounted for, something is significantly out of wack with propane...unless you are calling the EIA data out(sure there could be some error there...but 15.6% is a big error).
TIA
This is the data I used:
http://tonto.eia.doe.gov/oog/info/twip/twipprvwall.xls
http://tonto.eia.doe.gov/dnav/pet/hist/a103600001m.htm
The problem is that the EIA can't even get its own figures straight. In some places, the EIA provides data that show gasoline consumption on the increase. In other places, the same organization provides data that show gasoline consumption on the decline.
All data sources on oil and gas production, inventories and consumption are terrible, and most people don't seem to realize this. There aren't any reliable sources of information at this time.
And the concept of "demand" is grossly misunderstood by most people. If "demand" were really falling off, as "Benny" suggests (I don't read that blog, but I'll take your word for it), prices wouldn't be rising. A 2% drop in demand would cause more than a 30% decline in price. Prices are rising because there is increased competition for supply.
Most people would understand the concept of demand better if we used the term "competition" instead. There is more competition for the available supply now. The price shows this. Not all of the people competing for the available supply are going to receive supply, because there isn't enough supply for all of them. Some of them will get priced out, so the product supplied to them can go into decline even as "demand" goes up.
People like "Benny" want to believe that we are rapidly moving to increased efficiency and that this will take care of prices. There is some movement toward efficiency, but it's terribly slow. If we were getting more efficient at a decent pace, we wouldn't be seeing the problems with the economy that we're seeing.
Another factor in the price rise of the past year is that supply is on the decline. Even if production is flat (and we don't really know what production is, because we don't have reliable data) supply is actually in decline, because it is taking more oil to get the same production. But that factor in itself probably hasn't changed quickly enough to produce the magnitude of the price change we've seen.
I have never used those numbers because I don't know what the hell they mean.
If you divide those numbers by 42 it only amounts to about 1.5 million barrels per day
If they mean barrels per month it is also about 2 million per day. Perhaps someone can explain it to this slow mind.
One of the conclusions I've come to since browsing TOD is that the data (particuarly short-term data) on energy production, inventories, and consumption are not to be totally trusted. As I undertand it, much of this data is self-reported with little or no third-party auditing. I'm not neccesarily saying that the parties reporting the data are being deliberately misleading, only that when you see a production number like 3, 246, 700 bbls, you should take the last five digits with a big grain of salt.
Though I have no way of proving it, I strongly suspect that the margin of error in the data is far greater than many would like to admit and that many of the conclusions regarding small increases or decrease in production or inventories are probably unjustified as they fall close to or within that margin of error.
And saying that's the only data we've got so we have to work with it only makes things worse. If you have poor data, it's sometime best not to even attempt an analysis, as the results will give an illusion of certainty that is not justified. Over the long term, however, mnay of these errors probably cancel out, but it's in the short term where the numbers can get dodgy.
Excellent.
From MonteQuest at PO:
"
"Jevon's Paradox ... It says that increased efficiency leads to greater use of a resource.
Conservation leads to increased use by lowering the price.
If a community conserves, those outside it will consume the savings while those inside will see their jobs disappear as the consumption that employed them disappears.
We have to grow under our economic system or the house of cards falls.
Individuals can see immediate economic benefit until someone else within their community conserves what they make or do for a living."
Tragedy of the Commons
My post on US Petroleum Supply is talking about some of these same issues.
This is a graph of what I call "US Gasoline Supplied" from that post. Some would call this gasoline demand, since it is what people purchased. Clearly there the amount of gasoline supplied / used has not risen as fast in the past three years as it did previously.
The post gives more information for all oil products in total, and for distillate and other products.