Forecast overview

• New U.S. crude oil and natural gas production data. This month we are publishing regional crude oil and natural gas production data. These data provide a regional breakout of domestic crude oil and natural gas production in existing production tables and introduce some data series previously published in the Drilling Productivity Report and Shale Gas and Tight Oil into the STEO.

• U.S. crude oil production. U.S. crude oil production grows in our forecast by 2% from 2023 to an annual average of 13.2 million barrels per day (b/d) in 2024 and by another 4% in 2025 to 13.7 million b/d. Increasing production is led by the Permian region, which is the source of almost 50% of domestic crude oil production, followed by the Eagle Ford region and the Federal Gulf of Mexico.

• OPEC+ crude oil production. In our May outlook, we had assumed OPEC+ would begin to relax some voluntary production cuts beginning in the third quarter of 2024 (3Q24). In line with the group’s recent announcement, we now expect OPEC+ will begin relaxing voluntary cuts in 4Q24. As a result, we expect that the extension of voluntary OPEC+ production cuts will cause global oil inventories to continue falling through 1Q25. Although we expect crude oil prices to rise from early June levels, lower-than-expected Brent prices in May mean our forecast for 2024 is $84/b, 4% lower than our May forecast.

• Natural gas production. We expect U.S. marketed natural gas production to fall by 1% in 2024 because of low natural gas prices. Marketed natural gas production in the Haynesville region in our forecast falls by 9% this year and production in the Appalachia region falls by 4%. The forecast declines are partly offset by growth of 4% in the Permian region, largely because most of the natural gas produced in the Permian is associated with oil production. We forecast U.S. marketed natural gas production will increase by 2% next year, with growth in all three of these regions, as natural gas prices rise in our forecast.

• Natural gas prices. We expect that a drop in U.S. natural gas production in 2024 will continue to put upward pressure on the Henry Hub natural gas spot price. We expect that the Henry Hub spot price will average $2.50 per million British thermal units (MMBtu) this year, 13% higher than we expected last month, with prices rising from $2.12/MMBtu in May to $3.30/MMBtu in December 2024.

• Electricity expenditures. This summer—June through August—we expect that U.S. residential electricity customers’ monthly bills will average around $170, about the same as last summer. We expect that lower residential electricity prices in most areas of the country will partially offset slightly increased electricity consumption, a result of our assumption that summer temperatures will be warmer this year.

• Electricity consumption. We revised our forecast for retail sales of electricity to the commercial and industrial sectors slightly upwards from our May STEO to reflect changes in our expectations of power demand from data centers. We expect commercial demand, which includes demand from data centers, in the South Atlantic to increase by 5% in 2024 and 2% in 2025. We expect West South Central commercial sector demand will increase by 3% this year and 1% next year.

You can find more information in the detailed table of forecast changes.