The U.S. Energy Information Administration will ditch some of its reports, launch new surveys on data centers and critical minerals next year, and tweak its flagship Annual Energy Outlook, the agency’s new administrator Tristan Abbey said in a chat with the Center for Strategic and International Studies on Thursday.
The government’s statistical arm publishes weekly, monthly, and annual data on oil and gas output, crude and fuel inventories and price forecasts, used by traders and energy companies as indicators of supply and demand. The weekly reports, the highest-frequency official government data source on the biggest oil producers and consumers in the world, often move global oil prices.
“We have too many (products)… There is quite a bit of redundancy, and we are going to be targeting that very aggressively in the coming months,” Abbey said, citing some natural gas and electricity reports.
Abbey added that the agency will continue its market-moving reports and has few plans to change its surveys, but other items like the Southern California energy dashboard, which shows temperatures and electricity load in the region, are likely on the chopping block.
Abbey, who was part of U.S. President Donald Trump’s first administration, is currently the EIA’s only political appointee and took over in September as the newest administrator for the agency. He said the EIA was reimagining its Annual Energy Outlook, and its medium- and long-term forecasts could be separated. The statutorily mandated outlook, which Abbey said would be released in spring, contains energy consumption and supply and is
Abbey said he wants the agency’s international outlook incorporated into all forecasts, rather than issued as the separate International Energy Outlook.
The EIA, which is considering establishing a field office or site in Houston, is also aiming to launch more than 10 new surveys, Abbey said, including a suite of minerals surveys to cover vanadium, zirconium, and graphite, and surveys on data centers.
Abbey expressed concern about system architecture after Wednesday’s weekly EIA data was delayed by 38 minutes. The technical glitch allowed some traders to access U.S. oil market data earlier than others.
“It is a reminder of how old some of the IT systems and some of the other parts of the system architecture are at EIA, and how badly reform is needed,” Abbey said, adding that an investigation was underway.
(Reporting by Arathy Somasekhar in Houston; Editing by Kirsten Donovan)