Peak Oil And Peak Debt

The oil trade deficit for any country counts a lot of entry items and output items, in the US case including a rising amount of refined product exports. Invisibles include drilling and seismic services, equipment, financing and other revenue or value items, cutting the “big number” of the apparent deficit, based only on volume – not value – data for total gross imports of crude and products multiplied by the prevailing oil price.

The volume number counts two components: gross imports of crude and products, and net imports after re-exports. Where crude is imported, and products exported, the value gain (and refinery gains) help pay a part of the crude imports, reducing the net deficit on oil trade.

This “big number” for the OECD group is about 44.5 Mbd (million barrels a day), of which the US takes around 12.5 Mbd in May 2010. If we used an average year barrel price of US$ 100, this would generate a total “big number” of approximately 1625 billion US dollars a year for the OECD group.

Net imports after re-exports are running about 20 Mbd less than the gross import volume figure, at around 24.75 Mbd for the OECD group in May 2010. This net import volume number multiplied by the prevailing oil price gives the apparent net deficit on oil trade – excluding value items (oil services, equipment, financing etc).

At a year average barrel price of US$ 100, current net oil import volumes of the OECD group’s 27 importer countries would generate an apparent oil trade deficit of about US$ 900 billion a year.

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