Bernstein Points Out The Slowing Growth In U.S. Oil Production

From Platts The Barrel blog:

Bernstein Research, in an analyst’s note today, points out that the rate of increase in US crude oil production has recorded a significant slowdown in the last few weeks.

The researchers cite weekly Energy Information Agency data on weekly crude oil production.
The weekly data generally is not considered as accurate as the monthly data, or even more so, numbers that come out state-by-state. But it is the most up-to-date data, though subject to revisions later. As Bernstein points out, those revisions tend to knock about 200,000 b/d off the initial figures.

If you compare the year-on-year growth rate for 2013-2014 to the prior 13 months, the drop is noticeable. Tossing out a few hurricane related y-o-y growth rates in August and September of last year (Hurricane Isaac took a chunk of production offline in 2012), the y-o-y figures for most of 2013 were between 1.1-1.3 million b/d. The end-of-year figures showed total growth of 1.1 million b/d. (But that is comparing weekly-weekly data, not monthly data, which is not available yet for December.)

But in the last seven weeks, it has averaged about 1.09 million b/d, and in the last three reports, 1.053 million b/d. “October and November are two of the lowest growth months in the last year and a half (and company warnings on winter weather related production outages suggest this may continue),” the Bernstein report said....MORE