EIA reports a 1 Million bbl drop in weekly production???

[dig4value]

Hi Dan,
Todays EIA report shows a drop for domestic US production from 9.4M bbl/d last week to 8.4M bbl/d this week. A drop of over 1 Million bbl/d in production. How can that be???
The 4 week average is 9.25 M bbl/d and EIA has been reporting in the mid 9s for some time. I know you have been saying that they are about 200,000 barrels too high in their estimates of production, so are they trying to make it all up at once to fix their error??

http://ir.eia.gov/wpsr/overview.pdf

Pretty confused about these numbers.

Thanks for your reply in advance,

d4v

[dig4value]

Ok,
so I guess it was Hurricane NATE that shut down GOM production for a few days that would be reported for week of 10/13... this could account for the temporary drop of 1 M bbl/d.

FYI,

d4v

[dan_s]

The most current "actual" production numbers we have for the U.S. are for the month of July. EIA's weekly estimates were 220,000 bbls per day higher than the actuals for July.

August, September and October U.S. production will be impacted by hurricane activity. U.S. production has been flat since February.

To find actual production by month, go to the EIA website and search "Oil Production". I cannot stress enough how inaccurate EIA's weekly estimates of production are. They have no way of knowing actual production and their formulas for estimating production are flawed. Conventional U.S. oil production is on steady decline and Gulf of Mexico production is probably flat.