On Friday, the US Chamber of Commerce released a report, apparently timed for the weekend before the election when a number of fracking initiatives are on the ballot nationally, which alleged that "14.8 million jobs could be lost, gasoline prices and electricity prices could almost double, and each American family could see their cost of living increase by almost $4,000" if fracking were banned in the US.
Wednesday's release of US oil data for the week ending July 15th by the US Energy Information Administration indicated that our oil imports rebounded back to above recent averages, that our refineries ramped back up to seasonal levels to use all of those extra imports, and as a result another small portion of our monstrous glut of crude oil was converted into a glut of refined products.
Oil prices crashed along with global financial markets on Friday following the British vote on Thursday to exit the European Union (typically referred to as "Brexit"), which is widely expected to precipitate a period of political instability in Europe.
On Monday of last week, the U.S. Energy Information Administration posted an article on their daily blog (Today in Energy) titled "United States remains largest producer of petroleum and natural gas hydrocarbons".. The article featured a graph of our production of gas and oil vis a vis that of Russia and Saudi Arabia and went on to tell the familiar story about how fracking made it possible for our output of gas and oil to pass that of Russia in 2012
This Wednesday's Petroleum Status reports for the week ending May 6th from the Energy Information Administration indicated that our crude oil production fell a bit once again and that our imports of oil were virtually unchanged, while US refineries saw another modest increase in the amount of oil that they used.
Oil prices, and prices for everything that is refined from oil, continued to head up last week, something you don’t need me to tell you if you've bought gasoline lately. There has been no fundamental change in the global oversupply situation that would account for higher prices, however, but rather a change in the betting positions of oil speculators.
This week's oil data from the US Energy Information Administration showed that our oil inventories fell for the first time in 8 weeks, as our imports of oil also fell to their lowest in 8 weeks, and refiners used more crude than they had in any prior week this year.
The reality of the crude oil glut finally caught up with the oil price rally that had been driven by rumors of an OPEC / Russian pact last week, as oil prices fell 5% in their first weekly loss since mid-February. Almost the entirety of that drop occurred on Wednesday, after the EIA release of the weekly oil data, which showed a near record addition to our already record crude stockpiles.
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