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224 comments on DrumBeat: June 17, 2008

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westexas on June 17, 2008 - 9:44am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

And to put their planned (hoped for) increase in production in perspective, from 2005 to 2008, they probably will have increased their domestic consumption by about 500,000 bpd. I still wonder if they are curtailing domestic refinery runs (and then increasing imports of petroleum products, which aren't widely reported) in an attempt to boost reported crude oil exports. The net export numbers won't show up until some time next year.

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Gwydion on June 17, 2008 - 10:14am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

I got to thinking about if there was any way to track oil consumption within the KSA and thought about car sales as an indicator. I found this:

BMI has raised its automotive sales estimates from 3.8% to 5.0% in the light of strong sales in H207 and despite a dip in GDP growth to 2.7% from 4.3% in 2006. Total automotive sales in 2007 are estimated at over 545,000 units.

The population is about 27 million in the KSA, so just about 2.0% of the population bought cars last year. In the U.S. in 2004 there were about 7.5 million cars sold out of a population of 285 million (link), thus about 2.6% of the population bought a car that year. Also, the record in the U.S. for year to year increase was 5.88% in 1972-1973 but if you look at the KSA stats above, it's pretty close to that. So the KSA would probably have similar ownership per capita as the U.S., given another decade or two without TSHTF. Reduced exports indeed!

*edit* I made a mistake in one of the numbers that I corrected.

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Consumer on June 17, 2008 - 10:32am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

Any idea what their average fuel economy is? Or what models sell best?

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Gwydion on June 17, 2008 - 10:48am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

Nope, but seemingly you could estimate the consumption based on the range you see in other countries if you knew how many were on the road. My quick googling didn't come up with that one...

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karlof1 on June 17, 2008 - 12:49pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

Lots of interesting results from this google, like this one. That China is an active player in the Saudi auto market was surprising.

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224 comments on DrumBeat: June 17, 2008

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