Oil chart porn from the Wall Street Journal

As might be expected, the Wall Street Journal graphics department put together a great collection of charts for today' online edition of the paper in commemoration of yesterday's single crude oil futures contract that changed hands at an even $100.

In fact, included in about a half dozen reports on crude oil was an entire story on that one trade, "Record-Setting Trade Raised Doubts, But It Was Real", which, unfortunately is behind the subscription wall (come on Rupert, make the online version free).

Fortunately, the charts are in the public area of the WSJ and they are worth a good look. Here's the one that most surprised me under the right-most tab "The Biggest Users" (for larger crisper charts, follow the link above).
This is per capita use, so, in absolute terms, Saudi Arabia doesn't come close to the consumption levels of more populated countries such as the U.S or Japan, but consumption per person exceeding that of the U.S. and a brisk rate of change are pretty surprising.

Much has been written about the increasing domestic use of oil in Saudi Arabia and the rest of the Middle East, but this puts things into better perspective along with the chart below.

Of course the much more significant story is China, where per capita consumption is rising at more than eight percent per year as more and more people begin to drive cars and consume other products that use oil.

With global production essentially fixed at about 85 million barrels per day (at least for the time being), incremental changes to global demand are critical and that's where China is so important as shown below. The new demand from the Middle East is pretty important too.
The other charts are very good as well, particularly the first one with real and nominal prices going back to 1976 and the cool mouse-over feature.

In case you were wondering, the reason this post is titled "chart porn" (a term shamelessly stolen from Barry Ritholtz at The Big Picture) is that if you open the charts with a Windows Internet Explorer browser using Windows Vista, you get multiple windows opening on a somewhat random basis (at least, that's what happened to me).

It reminded me of six or eight years ago when a co-worker would come by and say, "Type in www.whitehouse.com" and up would come some porn site that proceeded to open more and more windows faster than you could close them ... and then the boss would walk by.