From Canada to Colombia to Brazil, oil and gas production in the Western Hemisphere is booming, with the United States emerging less dependent on supplies from an unstable Middle East. Central to the new energy equation is the United States itself, which has ramped up production and is now churning out 1.7 million more barrels of oil and liquid fuel per day than in 2005.Perhaps the WaPo thinks Zero should take credit for this.
Thank you, fracking. And oil workers. And steel workers. And geologists. May you one day finally have a government that lets you do your job.
Since 2006, exports to the United States have fallen from all but one major member of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries,
Anybody want to guess which one? I didn't find it.
the net decline adding up to nearly 1.8 million barrels a day. Canada, Brazil and Colombia have increased exports to the United States by 700,000 barrels daily in that time and now provide nearly 3.4 million barrels a day.
Six Persian Gulf suppliers provide just 22 percent of all U.S. imports, the nonpartisan U.S. Energy Information Administration said this month. The United States' neighbors in the Western Hemisphere, meanwhile, provide more than half -- a figure that has held steady for years because, as production has fallen in the oil powers of Venezuela and Mexico, it has gone up elsewhere.
Exports from Mexico and Venezuela have fallen in recent years, attributed to mismanagement and lack of investment at the state-owned oil industries in those countries. Even so, there is a possibility that new governments in Mexico and Venezuela -- Mexico elects a new president July 1, and Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez has cancer -- could open the energy industry to the private investment and expertise needed to boost production, analysts say.
Perhaps the biggest development in the worldwide realignment is how the United States went from importing 60 percent of its liquid fuels in 2005 to 45 percent last year. The economic downturn in the United States, improvements in automobile efficiency and an increasing reliance on
But a major driver has been the use of hydraulic fracturing. By blasting water, chemicals and tiny artificial beads at high pressure into tight rock formations to make them porous, workers have increased oil production in North Dakota from a few thousand barrels a day a decade ago to nearly half a million barrels today.
Gotta get that stuff regulated! To protect the environment, of course!
A host of new discoveries or rosy prospects for large deposits also has energy companies drilling in the Chukchi Sea inside the Arctic Circle, deep in the Amazon, along a potentially huge field off South America's northeast shoulder, and in the roiling waters around the Falkland Islands.
All without drilling in ANWR or off the sacred coasts of the US.
Production has risen strikingly fast in places such as the tar sands of Alberta, Canada, and the "tight" rock formations of North Dakota and Texas -- basins with resources so hard to refine or reach that they were not considered economically viable until recently.
Also Colorado