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114 comments on Oilwatch Monthly - February 2008
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114 comments on Oilwatch Monthly - February 2008
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I second that. Unfortunately, we only get free data for 3 months of estimates, from the IEA. From the data so far, we have:
October: 86.51 (the last revision that was available for free)
November: 86.08 (second revision)
December: 86.45 (first revision)
January: 87.2 (initial estimate)
This is not reflected in Rembrandt's graph.
Also, the first paragraph under the initial graph is wrong. The IEA figure of 87.2 is for January, not December, and that was an increase on December, not October.
Furthermore, in that first paragraph, Rembrandt says, "For the third consecutive month world production has increased significantly." Again, this is wrong, given the revised figures. Production actually decreased in November, and rose only 375,000 bpd in December, which I suppose could be thought of as significant. What is true is that the IEA initially reported significant increases for the last four OMRs, but this was only possible because of significant downward revisions for the previous month.
Edit:
Spotted more potential errors in the article. It says that the IEA reported production of 87.20. This implies a precision of two decimal points. If the article's figures are based only on the OMR summary, the precision there is only 1 decimal point, for the latest production. For example, in the January OMR, they reported 87.0 mbpd, but the full report had 86.95. That may be a small reduction but it would be good to publish accurate quotes, rather than slightly misleading ones, since there is no reason not to.
In the figures given for yearly production for 2005, 2006 and 2007, those numbers seem to be at odds with the figures that were published in the January OMR, with the figures being higher than Rembrandt gives here. The January OMR gives figures of 84.6, 85.4 and 85.5 for 2005, 2006 and 2007 (though the last figure may have been revised down in the latest OMR; we'll have to wait and see). Rembrandt has these figures as 84.10, 85.00 and 85.26, respectively. Is he somehow removing some liquid category (e.g. ethanol)? If so, why not remove it from the monthly figures?
About the number of significant figures in the data, the only reason that it seems important at all is that it does provide a bit of paper trail and you might be able to track the origin of the data by matching all the digits. Otherwise, plotting the numbers on a graph it doesn't make a bit of difference, and the noise swamps out precision.
It seems to me that a logical approach would be to basically ignore the near term IEA data, which appear to be guesstimates, and wait for the EIA to update their data, so that it would be somewhat more of an apples to apples comparison, so the last two months of IEA data on the graph would be chopped off, and the revised IEA data for November would be shown.
Yeah, that would be better. If a high production figure is posted in the initial OMR, we get a bunch of deniers saying "told you so". In the last two OMR's, the previous monthly figure has been revised sharply down, but that never seems to make the headlines. The IEA only says production increased by huge amounts, because of this that or the other. It is all analysis that is made worthless the following month when it's not unheard of to find that the figure actually went down, not up.
But I've asked a number of times if anyone has access to the full data. The figures posted here are, presumably, using the last publicly available figures but revisions can go on for months after that. Are the figures used in Oilwatch Monthly (when they're correct) from the actually data base or from the free information?