By 2020, the US is projected to become the world’s largest global oil producer.
(Energy and Capital)
Despite Barack Obama’s best efforts, the current shale boom is projected to turn the US into the world’s largest oil producer.
Rigzone reported:
A shale oil boom means the U.S. will overtake Saudi Arabia as the world’s largest oil producer by 2020, a radical shift that could profoundly transform not just the world’s energy supplies, but also its geopolitics, the International Energy Agency said Monday.
In its closely watched annual World Energy Outlook, the IEA, which advises industrialized nations on their energy policies, said the global energy map “is being redrawn by the resurgence in oil and gas production in the United States.”
The assessment is in stark contrast with last year, when it envisioned Russia and Saudi Arabia vying for the top position.
“By around 2020, the United States is projected to become the largest global oil producer” and to overtake Saudi Arabia for a time, the agency said. “The result is a continued fall in U.S. oil imports [currently at 20% of its needs] to the extent that North America becomes a net oil exporter around 2030.”
This major shift will be driven primarily by the faster-than-expected development of hydrocarbon resources locked in shale and other tight rock formations that have just started to be unlocked by a new combination of two technologies: hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling.
Within a decade, the IEA forecasts U.S. oil imports will fall by more than half, to just 4 million barrels a day from 10 million barrels a day currently. Much of this decline will be due to higher domestic production, but efforts to improve energy efficiency in the transport sector will also prove significant, the IEA said.
Of course, these gains in oil production occurred in spite of Obama’s anti-energy policies.
The Institute for Energy Research reported:
The Energy Information Administration (EIA) is projecting that U.S. domestic crude oil production will increase to 6.8 million barrels per day in 2013, which is the highest level of production since 1993.[i] This is good news for Americans, and, of course, President Obama will try to take credit for it. But little of this increased oil production is in offshore waters of the Gulf of Mexico where most federal oil production occurs. In fact, federal Gulf of Mexico oil production decreased in fiscal year 2011 and then again in fiscal year 2012 due to the Obama Administration’s policies, particularly the moratorium on drilling and permitting that occurred after the Macondo accident and other policies…
…The trend during the Obama Administration has been toward fewer leases and permits for oil and gas drilling and a longer processing time before approval is attained in sharp contrast to state programs where permits are obtained in less than a month. Further, these Obama Administration policies along with its moratorium on drilling after the Macondo accident have reduced the amount of oil produced on federal lands that we Americans own. Gulf of Mexico oil production is not even expected to regain the peak it reached in 2010 by 2013, according to the EIA. If states can take less than a month to approve drilling permits on their lands, why does it take the federal government 307 days to reach approval? The record is becoming clear that the federal government is a poor steward of our national energy supplies and security.
