Is US Oil Production Surging?

Is US oil production surging? I am certain that if you have been on Twitter lately, you must've seen a few people post pictures of how close US oil production is to the pre-pandemic highs. You can't blame these people for buying into that story. In EIA's latest weekly oil storage report, US oil production was re-benchmarked to ~12.9 million b/d to match the short-term energy outlook update (or STEO).

But what people may not realize is that the EIA weekly US oil production figure has lagged behind the monthly production figures for almost a year. It's funny that it has taken them this long to re-benchmark. 

Now before we begin, it's important to remind you of an important update the EIA did to US oil production tracking. On August 31, we published a very important update on US oil production. In that report, we noted that EIA is trying to be more transparent in what goes into the "adjustment" figure. 

To make the long story short, EIA pegged US oil production in June 2023 at 12.844 million b/d, 634k b/d was in transfers to crude oil supply (i.e. blending), and adjustment came in at -200k b/d.

Our old formula for calculating "real" US oil production was as follows:

Production + adjustment = Real production