I got this from Eric Vettel, Ph.D. from the American Energy Society and I thought I would share it.
The world cannot account for 800,000 “missing barrels” of oil every day, the difference between the 1.9 million barrels global oil production and the roughly 1.1 million b/d of oil calculated as being in transit or in storage.
There are many explanations:
a) a production outage in Nigeria
b) a pipeline glitch in Kurdistan
c) a lot of it is in China in the form of stockpiles
d) India has some sitting in pipelines and in ships
e) a normal accounting deviation,
f) all of the above
g) none of the above; it's a myth - the missing barrels simply don’t exist
The better question is this: does it matter that there might be 800,000 missing barrels of oil each day?
A. Probably not, except that it is making the market nervous. One thing is certain: the nervous market won’t pause to reflect.
