Tightly Controlled Oil Supply Slips Into Surplus

In June I posted a Cato Institute article "Get Ready for the Oil Price Drop." At the time I read (but never linked) a separate article on American.com that showed the careful balance between world supply and demand for oil that allows relatively small inventory changes to effect relatively large price changes.

The data available at the time was only through the end of 2007 and was still showing a supply deficit. The latest data, updated earlier this month, shows the first surplus since 2005 occurred in the second quarter of this year. It's not difficult to understand, then, how the predicted oil price drop materialized in the form of $1.70 gas replacing the $4 variety.

The graph above is my own, created from EIA's Excel data, to which I've added the "Total World Supply Balance" data line comprising supply minus demand. Note that I had to multiply the resulting data by 10 in order to see plus or minus movement on the same scale as the overall supply and demand. The take away from this should be that adding as little as 1.9 million barrels per day (2.3%) to the world oil market at any time in the last 2.5 years would have put the market in surplus at the time. Remember that the next time someone says, "The small amount of oil we could produce domestically would not lower prices for 10 to 15 years."

Oil and Energy Posted by JohnGalt at November 25, 2008 3:13 PM