OPEC May Production Data

All data below is based on the latest OPEC Monthly Oil Market Report.

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

OPEC crude only production was up 336,000 barrels per day in May. The two countries that are not subject to OPEC quotas, Nigeria and Libya, were up a combined 352,000 barrels per day. That means the rest of OPEC was down 16,000 bpd. And all this was after OPEC April production was revised upward by 72,000 barrels per day.

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Texas Update, May 2017

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The Chart above compares several different combinations of past (vintage) data to estimate output. The dotted line is based on the most recent 8 months (August 2016 to March 2017) of data saved from the RRC website, the blue solid line is based on the past 12 months of data, and the yellow line is based on the most recent 3 months of data. Read More

OPEC April Production Data

All data below is based on the latest OPEC Monthly Oil Market Report.

All data is through April 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.

I wrote the above paragraph last month. I see no reason to change a word of it now.

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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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