The Oil Drum

I actually started on this post about a year ago, and forgot about it until recently. Here I provide 2007 numbers on the sources for oil and gasoline imports into the U.S., courtesy of the Energy Information Administration.

For 2007, the Top 10 exporters of finished gasoline to the U.S. in million barrels were:

Which countries are increasing in oil production? Which are decreasing? How is this changing? Can we expect that the increasing ones will continue to increase in 2008? Does the megaprojects data give any insight into the future increases of growing countries? These are some of the questions that Matt Mushalik and I explore in this post using what Matt calls "incremental production graphs".

On Thursday, January 17, the American Petroleum Institute (API) hosted another Blogger Conference Call. The purpose of this call was to talk about 2008 US statistical data regarding oil supply, and various related issues. In this post, I provide insights from API's bloggers call. Since most of the numbers are fairly similar to EIA data, I also look at longer trends using EIA data.

1. API Statistical Report: In 2007, total domestic petroleum deliveries were flat--marking the third year in a row for which they experienced only minimal growth or outright decline.

This is a guest article by Dudley Stark, Reader in Mathematics and Probability in the School of Mathematical Sciences, Queen Mary, University of London. It is a summary of his paper The limit of the statistic R/P in models of oil discovery and production, which has been accepted to appear in the International Journal of Pure and Applied Mathematical Sciences.

"2005 was a third consecutive year of rising energy prices. Tight capacity, extreme weather, continued conflict in the Middle East, civil strife elsewhere and growing interest in energy among financial investors led to rising prices", said Lord Browne, CEO of BP plc. "Although energy prices have increased, there has been no physical shortage of either oil or gas." According to the BP Statistical Review of World Energy 2006, oil holds a reserves-to-production ratio of 40 years, gas of some 65 years and coal of 162 years. With the advancement of technology, more energy resources will also be discovered in the future."

Quote taken from the BP China Website. (Note: Lord Browne is no longer CEO of BP.)

http://www.prweb.com/releases/peak/oil/prweb635891.htm

We would appreciate your spreading this around to interested parties. Thanks much!

Last night, on ABC's Nightline, Terry Moran interviewed President Bush in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, during his trip to the Middle East. When discussing what President Bush might say to the King of Saudi Arabia to lower oil prices, George Bush said:

If they don't have a lot of additional oil to put on the market, it is hard to ask somebody to do something they may not be able to do.

If Saudi Arabia doesn't have a much additional oil to put on the market, the veracity of what Saudi Arabia has been saying about extra capacity is brought into question. More importantly, it starts raising questions about Saudi Arabia's true long-term oil production capability. Can Saudi Arabia really ramp up oil production in the future? Are the high reserves posted by Saudi Arabia and other Middle-Eastern countries really indicative of high future production capability?

The interview with George W. Bush can be seen at this link. The above quote is about 1:55 into the interview.

This is a link to a Press Release we did with respect to this story. Feel free to link to it in your Blogs.

While I intend to write a post covering the top energy stories of 2007, Platts is asking for reader input on the top oil industry stories of 2007:

The top 10 oil industry stories of 2007

A lot of the listed stories would make both lists. I list my Top 10 below that I submitted to Platts. The first few were easy, but I had a hard time picking between the last three or four.

My impression is that we spend a lot of time trying to interpret comments or actions from Saudi Arabia, without attempting to understand the issues from their perspective. I think it is a useful exercise to ask whether their specific actions or comments make sense; 1). From the Saudi perspective, and 2). In the context of the market.

For example, when Saudi said that they were having trouble finding buyers for their crude in the spring of 2006, I won't simply look at the price and dismiss those comments as lies. I do a bit of digging. And when I uncovered that OECD crude inventories were high and rising at the time, that Iran said essentially the same thing at the same time, that any of Saudi's customers could pick up the phone and offer to purchase more crude, yet nobody came out and suggested that they had been unable to secure Saudi crude, then I concluded that those comments were consistent with the evidence available to us. (The final point is significant, because as soon as Saudi started putting Asian refiners on allocation later in the year, a number of Asian refiners leaked that news to the press. Certainly the same would have been true had Saudi falsely announced that they had crude but no buyers).

The US Energy Information Administration (EIA) puts out a lot of data. Even for the United States, the amount of data is overwhelming. To get an overview, I have prepared some graphs showing information I find interesting, and occasionally somewhat alarming. I include links to the underlying data, so those who are good with Excel can find data to make their own graphs.

1. EIA reports show oil production on a "total liquids" basis. What does this include for the United States?

Figure 1

Discussion follows below the fold.

Not too long ago, I nearly quit writing, because I was losing control of my free time. I came to a compromise solution that has worked out well for me: I have continued to write, but I have reduced time dedicated to debates, correspondence, and addressing questions or criticisms about my essays. It is now apparent that it was not the writing, but instead the peripheral stuff that was really eating up all my time.

However, as a result of the change, some comments and questions that are directed at me go unanswered. Sometimes someone will make a criticism or comment that I would like to address, but I know it will lead to several more responses. In order to "catch up" with some of this without once again getting involved in protracted exchanges, on my way out of town for a business trip I put up a brief post inviting readers to ask questions or make comments. I hadn't originally intended to post it here, but there were quite a few topics that have been discussed at length here at TOD. So, I went through, picked out some of the questions, and took a stab at answering them.

There are questions on biobutanol, gasoline inventories, refinery margins, debunking, ethanol, investing, the future of the oil industry, where to live to ride out Peak Oil, and whether I have now lost hope. I sometimes excerpted the questions, but I linked to the originals so you can see them in complete context.