Monday, February 28, 2011

The Curious Case of US Oil Production

I have lately been updating my oil production numbers and plots, first Oklahoma, Texas, and world (OTW) production then Saudi Arabia. In the OTW blog entry I mentioned that I was still working on a US production update.

Digging through my thousands of files, I was able to relocate the data for US oil production from 1857 to 2006. This data had been carefully constructed from various sources and I wrote a Leading Edge Seismos column using it in May 2008. Here is the daily production figure from that column:



Figure 1. Daily US oil production plot from 2008 Seismos column.


Since I finally found the data behind the plot, it seemed a simple matter to add the last 4 years of production  and format the plot like the others I had posted in this blog. 

Naturally, the first place to turn in such matters is the venerable BP Statistical Review.  But something was immediately confusing to me.  Note my data in Fig 1 shows annual production for the US (including offshore and Alaska) as 5.14 MMBO/D. The BP Review showed 6.84 million BO/D for the same year, a whopping 33% difference. Confused, I then checked the Energy Information Administration and found values similar to BP. 

Was I going crazy? I'm not getting any younger, you know. Maybe this was a case of some mild stroke that left me in a confused world. But no, the Seismos column was there as evidence. So maybe I just used bad data back then. But no, wikipedia shows the same thing, and I read a recent paper (Nashawi et al., 2010) containing a daily US production plot (fig 15) that syncs perfectly with mine. Here it is:



Figure 2. US production from Nashawi et al. (2010)

Well, research is what I do, so the chase was on. The result is summarized in Fig 3.  The data comes from my earlier research (green dots), BP Statistical Review 2010 (BP, red dots), the Energy Information Administration (EIA, blue dots), and one data point each from International Energy Agency (IEA, white triangle),  and American Petroleum Institute (API, white square).  The IEA number (244840  thousand tonnes per day) needs a bit of conversion.  Wolfram|Alpha shows this represents 1.68 x 10^9 barrels of oil, or 4.603 million barrels per day.  


Clearly, I would be curious to see a full series of production numbers from IEA or API, but have been unable to figure out if these groups keep historical data on the internet.  

Figure 3. The mystery in a nutshell.  My green trend is supported by 2008 and 2010 numbers from API and IEA.  Meanwhile, BP and EIA are about 30% higher.  What the heck is going on?


Figure 4. Detail of Fig 3 from 1960-2010

At this point I have no resolution to the mystery, I just wanted to lay it out for all to see.  It is hard to imagine this discrepancy is due to definitions of crude oil (e.g, is shale oil included? condensate? heavy oil?).  Any of these would be in the accounting noise, not a 30% difference.


Comments are welcome.

References:


Liner, C., 2008, To peak or not to peak, The Leading Edge 27, 610.

Nashawi, I.S., Malallah, A., and Al-Bisharah, M., 2010,Forecasting World Crude Oil Production Using Multicyclic Hubbert Model, Energy Fuels, 24, 1788-1800.

Note: Along these same lines, North Dakota is producing more oil than ever.