The Oil Drum: May IEA Oil Market Report

Holy Monkeyboards Oilman! What’s that gentle upward tilt doing on our hitherto pristine plateau?

According to the IEA Oil Market Report (which I am late in getting too – apologies but real life has called insistently of late), the oil industry has had a good couple of months:

World oil supply in April rose by 485 kb/d to 85.1 mb/d. Increases from OPEC, the FSU, Africa and North America were partly offset by seasonal North Sea outages. … April OPEC crude supply rose by 170 kb/d to 30.0 mb/d. This followed higher output in Iraq, despite ongoing pipeline problems, and to a lesser extent Nigeria, Venezuela and Libya.

Thus not only is their preliminary figure for April the highest ever, but they revised the fairly high figure for March a little higher. Here’s the graph of the IEA’s initial monthly estimates, together with their revised estimate the following month and the more tardy (and careful?) EIA estimates. But is this right?

Much more after the jump to The Oil Drum.