faultlinesweekly

The U.S. Energy Information Administration released the EIA Winter Fuels Outlook 2026–27 on October 6, 2026, forecasting that households heating mainly with natural gas will spend an average of $640 this winter, 9% less than last winter, while heating oil households will spend $2,115, up 21%. Those figures read like this winter's heating bills, but EIA counts every end use of a home's main heating fuel, so the $1,196 forecast for electrically heated homes covers that home's electricity use outside air conditioning, not space heating alone. For anyone comparing fuels, budgeting for the season, or setting the outlook beside the September CPI published on October 14, 2026, that changes what the numbers can answer: the outlook prices a fuel account, not a furnace. Three more readings follow from the same release. A flat national weather assumption hides a Northeast forecast to be 12% milder and a West forecast to be 25% colder. A falling natural gas price forecast sits besid...

On October 14, 2026 the Bureau of Labor Statistics followed its September consumer price headline with a gasoline sentence: “The index for gasoline rose 9.1 percent in September, accounting for over half of the monthly all items increase.” Further down, in parentheses, the same report gives a second figure for the same fuel and month: “Before seasonal adjustment, gasoline prices increased 6.5 percent in September.” The Energy Information Administration’s pump survey, averaged over the month, puts the all-grades increase at 7.1 percent. These are not three estimates of one thing. Two are price changes measured on different schedules; the third is a price change measured against what September normally does. The 2.6 points between 9.1 and 6.5 are a seasonal factor, and they decide whether the release’s opening claim holds: on an unadjusted basis, gasoline accounts for under half of the all-items increase. The trail starts in the BLS Consumer Price Ind...

On October 2, 2026 the U.S. Energy Information Administration published an item headed “U.S. natural gas production reached a record high in July 2026” and put the record at 137 billion cubic feet per day. That is gross withdrawals: the full well stream as it leaves the ground. The same July column in EIA's own production table also carries a marketed production figure and a dry production figure, and both are smaller. Divided by July's 31 days they come to 125.2 Bcf/d and 113.7 Bcf/d. The distance from the headline to the consumer-grade volume is 23.3 Bcf/d, which is 17.0 percent of the record. Three line items in that table are defined as the deductions that bridge the first two volumes. Each prints NA. The difference they are supposed to explain is 366,894 million cubic feet, recoverable only by subtraction. That record was announced in EIA Today in Energy, U.S. natural gas production reached a record high in July 2026 . The question underneath it is which of the three ...

Table 10.1 of the Monthly Energy Review puts United States solar energy consumption at 180 trillion Btu for June 2026. That figure is not a measurement of heat. It is a count of kilowatthours multiplied by a conversion factor, and the Energy Information Administration publishes two different factors for that multiplication inside the same monthly report. One is 3,412 Btu per kilowatthour. The other, for a June 2026 period, is 8,617. Both are official, neither is a rounding artifact, and the choice between them moved the noncombustible-renewable share of energy consumption for utility-scale electricity generation from 6% to 15% in 2018. The agency explains the choice twice, in Appendix A and again in Appendix E. That explanation is what most citations of the 180 leave out. Where the 3,412 Comes From Start with the footnote attached to the solar column of Table 10.1. In EIA, Monthly Energy Review, Section 10, Renewable Energy , footnote h reads: "Solar photovoltaic (PV) and solar...

For the week ending September 25, 2026, the U.S. Energy Information Administration published a refinery utilization rate of 92.5 percent. Two weeks earlier the same series read 96.8 percent. The natural reading of a 4.3 point fall is that something came out of service: a unit down, a turnaround started, a plant idled. That reading is wrong, and the release itself supplies the correction. Across both weeks the capacity figure in the denominator sat at 18,027 thousand barrels per day and moved by zero. Every point of the decline came from the numerator, and the numerator is not crude oil. This is a definitional fault line rather than an arithmetic one. The percent has a published formula, and that formula names a numerator and a denominator that are each narrower and wider than the headline suggests. Follow both terms to the documents that define them and 92.5 percent stops being a statement about how full American refineries are. It becomes a statement about how much of three input cl...