Oil Price Volatility and US EIA Data

A number of news media pieces have recently suggested that oil prices may fall due to soaring output in the US.  Output from US light tight oil (LTO) may not rise as quickly as some EIA reports may suggest. One source of confusion is that the EIA creates many reports and some are more reliable than others. The two charts below cover US LTO and US crude plus condensate (C+C) output.

US LTO Output from the EIA Drilling Productivity Report (DPR) and EIA Tight Oil (LTO) estimates in kb/d.

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US EIA monthly C+C output and centered 4 week average output in kb/d.

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OPEC March Crude Oil Data

The OPEC Monthly Oil Market Report is out with OPEC’s crude oil production numbers for March 2017.

All data is through March 2017 and is in thousand barrels per day.

Looking at the above chart it seems obvious what most OPEC nations were doing. They announced in the summer of 2016 that there would likely be quota cuts beginning in 2017. And those cuts would be a percentage of their current production. So everyone began making heroic attempts to increase production by the end of 2016. So now, after everyone who felt that they should cut, has cut, they are right back to the level that they were at before the cuts were proposed.

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