by kublikhan » Fri 15 Mar 2019, 17:47:48
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Yoshua', 'A')ccording to Art Berman's calculations U.S crude inventories are 137 million barrels higher today than reported by EIA.
It was not "Art Berman's calculations". It was the EIA's own calculations. Art Berman was simply pointing out the EIA's fudge factor called "unaccounted for oil". This fudge factor, which has always existed, has grown recently. That's not shocking, this number goes up and down over the years. Sometimes positive sometimes negative. 137 million change in this accounting variable is nothing. It changed by half a million barrels between 2014 and 2015. IEA has a similar accounting line called “miscellaneous to balance”. Congress actually investigated these "mission barrels" back in 1999 to determine why the discrepancy had grown so large. Turns out, no conspiracy:
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'M')ARCH 8, 2016 - Of the 1 billion barrels reportedly produced but not consumed, roughly 420 million are being stored on land in member countries of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). Another 75 million barrels are thought to be stored at sea or in transit by tanker somewhere from the oil fields to the refineries. That leaves 550 million “missing barrels” unaccounted for, apparently produced but not consumed and not visible in the inventory statistics.
Missing barrels are recorded in the “miscellaneous to balance” line of the IEA’s monthly Oil Market Report as the difference between production, consumption and reported stock changes. The miscellaneous item reflects errors in data from OECD countries, errors in the agency’s estimates for supply and demand in non-OECD countries, and stockpile changes outside the OECD that go unrecorded. IEA data currently shows a miscellaneous to balance item of 0.5 million barrels per day in 2014 and 1.0 million barrels per day in 2015.
Missing barrels have been a feature of IEA statistics since the 1970s. Most of the time, the oil market ignores the miscellaneous to balance item, but it tends to become controversial when it becomes very large, either positive or negative.
ERRORS AND OMISSIONSThe last time the miscellaneous to balance item was this large and positive (implying an oversupplied market) was in 1997/98 when the issue triggered fierce criticism of the IEA’s statistics. Critics accused the IEA of over-estimating supply, under-estimating demand, contributing to perception of a glut, depressing prices, and causing unnecessary hardship to the oil industry.
Senator Pete Domenici, chairman of the U.S. Senate Budget Committee, asked the General Accounting Office to investigate the IEA’s statistics and the question of missing barrels. In a report published in May 1999, GAO concluded “missing barrels are not a new condition, and the amount and direction of missing barrels have fluctuated over time. At any point in time, the historical oil supply and demand as well as the stock data reported by IEA could be overstated or understated by an unknown magnitude." It was not possible to “quantify how much of the missing barrels are due to statistical limitations and how much are the result of physical oil storage in unreported stocks”.
In 1997/98 episode, the IEA concluded most of the missing barrels went into non-OECD storage and uncounted OECD inventories. In the current episode, it is also very likely some of the 550 million barrels unaccounted for in 2014/15 have gone into unreported storage outside the OECD. China’s government is known to have been filling its Strategic Petroleum Reserve. More barrels are likely to have gone into commercial storage in China and in other countries outside the OECD.
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'M')AY 20, 2015 - Oil-market watchers are struggling to reconcile the large estimated oversupply in the market with the much smaller buildup of reported inventories and narrowing contango in futures prices. U.S. crude stocks have indeed increased by around 100 million barrels since the start of the year while China’s stocks appear to have risen by between 50 and 100 million barrels. But that still leaves more than 100 million barrels that have simply vanished from the international statistical system. These lost barrels show up under error terms such as “miscellaneous-to-balance” and “unaccounted for” in reports published by statistical agencies.
The “missing barrels” problem is not a new one: it was the hot topic during 1998 and 1999 when I first began writing about the oil industry. Its December 1999 monthly report entitled “an un-fond farewell to the missing barrels” explained:
“During the first half of 1998 a large amount of the excess supply in the oil market was unaccounted for ... There was strong disagreement at the time as to whether these ‘missing barrels’ were the result of statistical errors, or whether they represented a large increase in oil stored in non-OECD areas. “Almost two years later ... the weight of evidence is that the missing barrels did exist and that they have now returned to the market. The return was triggered by the reversal in the shape of the forward price curve and the need for additional barrels following OPEC’s effective production limitation which began last March”