Chapter IV

FORECASTING SUFFLY AND DEMAND BALANCE

1.

Introduction

This chapter presents the base case forecast, a summary of the high demand forecast, and a documentation of the econometric demand estimating procedure. In addition, forecasts made by FEA and the Independent Petroleum Association of America (IPAA) are compared to actual consumption estimates. The actual consumption estimates are derived from two data sources: (1) for the period January to July of 1974, Bureau of Mines (BOM) numbers are used; (2) for the period August to October 1974, American Petroleum Institute (API) numbers are used. The IPAA forecasts extend through the last quarter of 1975.

It should be noted that the demand estimates provided by the econometric model differ slightly from those appearing in the forecast. This difference is due to rounding when the national demand figure is disaggregated into PAD demands and then recalculated by summing the individual PAD demands.