By JOHN P. TRETBAR
Eagle Media
Crude oil prices held steady on Monday after ringing in the New Year with a big spike. NYMEX crude prices on Friday rose from two-month highs to close at $73.96 per barrel, a weekly gain of more than three dollars a barrel. By midday Monday offers in New York were over $74. Brent crude in London was trading over $76 per barrel.
Kansas prices climbed a dollar and a half Friday. Kansas Common crude at CHS in McPherson starts the week at $63.50 per barrel. That's a half dollar higher than a year ago, and nearly four dollars higher than a week ago. Its almost four dollars over the average price for December 2024.
EIA says domestic commercial crude stockpiles dropped by more than a million barrels to just over 415 million. Stockpiles are about five percent below the five-year average for this time of year.
The Energy Department took delivery on another 300,000 barrels of crude to refill the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. Strategic reserves are now up near 394 million barrels, up 11% or nearly 40 million barrels from a year ago.
The government reports crude-oil imports for the final week of the year outpaced exports by more than three million barrels a day. US crude imports rose nearly half a million barrels a day to 6.9 million. The four week average drops to six-and-a-half-million barrels a day. Crude exports averaged 3.8 million barrels a day.
The Rotary Rig Count from Baker Hughes starts the new year largely unchanged at 589 rigs. The oil count is down one rig while the gas tally is up one. Texas was up one rig while Louisiana drops by one.
For the past six years, US crude production has been the best ever, anywhere. Government numbers show the totals are still going up. The Energy Information Administration in the last year has reported record after broken record, starting with the annual average for the year 2023 of 12.9 million barrels a day. That beat the previous record set in 2019. This year's output will top 13.2 million barrels a day. EIA says the US records are unlikely to be broken any time soon by anyone else, because among the next largest producers, no other country has reached production capacity of 13 million barrels a day. Average annual production in Russia peaked in 2019 at 10.8 million barrels per day. Saudi Arabia's production topped out at 10.6 million barrels a day two years ago.
US Production in September dropped by 1.2% from August, to 13,204,000 barrels per day. That's up 100,000 barrels a day from September of last year. Crude production in Texas rose 0.1%, topping 5.8 million barrels a day, or 40% of US output. New Mexico dropped slightly from August, but still topped two million barrels a day, up 15 percent year-over-year. North Dakota was up for the month but down from a year ago, at just under 1.2 million barrels a day. Colorado rose by nearly five percent to 477,000 barrels a day. Oklahoma output rose by 140-thousand daily barrels to just under 398,000 barrels a day.
Weekly US crude production dropped, but remained above 13.5 million barrels a day for only the eighth time in history. The Energy Information Administration reported cumulative output will end the year above 13.26 million barrels a day, rising more than five percent over a year ago.
EIA estimates Kansas production at 76,000 barrels a day through September, down from 77,000 through August, but up from 75,000 barrels per day posted a year earlier. Raw numbers from the Kansas Geological Society show Ellis County output slipped a fraction under 5,700 barrels per day. Finney County pumped just under 4,500 barrels a day. Haskell County produced just under 4,300. Barton County is number four in the county rankings at just over 3,800 barrels a day. Russell County is fifth at 3,500. Next come Rooks and Ness counties, followed by Stafford County at 2,300 barrels a day. Rounding out the top ten are Graham and Butler counties.