
The United States Is Now the Largest Global Crude Oil Producer - jonbaer
https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=37053&src
======
aphextron
It's been fascinating to watch Saudi influence wane over the last few years as
this sinks in as the new reality. We live in a completely different power
structure now from 20 years ago. They're certainly still obscenely rich, but
the power they had over geopolitics via OPEC is effectively gone at this point
due to tar sands, renewables, and natural gas.

~~~
tonyedgecombe
I wonder what the next 20 years will bring, especially with the shift to
electric vehicles.

~~~
derekp7
Most people I talk with in my peer group wouldn't even think of getting an
all-electric car (except maybe as a secondary vehicle), due to range anxiety.
However, what I think will happen over the next 20 years (with battery
improvement, etc) is more and more hybrids and plugin hybrids. For example,
see Ford's plans starting in 2020.

But the plugin hybrids won't be sold as "fuel efficient", but sold as "more
powerful". However once people start doing most of their driving in all-
electric mode, that will cause many gas stations to go out of business (since
they run on razor thin margins). That will then be the push to make the leap
to all electric in the following generation. In other words, I fully expect
plug-in hybrids to be the bridge to all electric.

~~~
melling
How much range do people need before there's no longer range anxiety?

People used to complain about 200 miles not being enough then Tesla released
300 miles then they said that's not enough either.

~~~
creato
For me, it's not really the range at all, it's what you do at the end of the
range. Charging stations are rare and slow, fuel stations are common and
quick.

I don't see why gas-electric hybrids, with say, 20-50 miles of electric-only
range aren't more popular. That would eliminate the vast majority of fossil
fuel usage [1], and avoid this problem entirely. It also seems a lot cheaper
than loading a car with hundreds of miles worth of batteries.

1\.
[http://www.solarjourneyusa.com/EVdistanceAnalysis.php](http://www.solarjourneyusa.com/EVdistanceAnalysis.php)

~~~
losteric
The public is always reluctant to change established behavior and
expectations... mass adoption requires revolutionary change that overcomes
perceived functional and financial costs of switching, or evolutionary change
with no perceived cost.

So EV will see mass adoption as soon as people can top up at a "charge
station" in under 3 minutes and get 200+ mile range - because that's what
people expect from "a car". The public doesn't care about the evolution of
implementation details like gas vs electric.

The beautiful part is that once home charging is no longer required, people
will be happy to charge at home! We are an adorably irrational species.

Alternatively, there is a revolutionary path: autonomous vehicles. If AI-EV
offered completely hands-off transportation, no driving or maintenance
required, people would happily ignore any perceived transition costs. However,
this path seems unlikely in the near future.

~~~
dplavery92
>The beautiful part is that once home charging is no longer required, people
will be happy to charge at home! We are an adorably irrational species.

The problem isn't that people are _unhappy_ to charge at home now, it's that
_if_ and _when_ I need to travel more than 200 miles without stopping at home,
I need supporting infrastructure (and planning to find it) or to use another
vehicle.

~~~
wastedhours
Plus, I live in an apartment block with the under-building garage not having
any plug sockets. Unless I drape an extension lead down 5 storeys and about
150m away, I can't see the upgrade path at the moment.

There probably are sockets closer, but it's not as simple as "park and
charge", but either "lobby the building management and get sockets installed"
or "find a hacky solution with long cables".

------
heisenbit
There are some question marks on how sustainable the US oil boom is as the
extraction methods are quite capital intensive. We are at historic low capital
price and have a fairly high oil price and still the profitability picture is
not pretty.

To dig deeper see: [https://wolfstreet.com/2018/08/15/shale-profits-remain-
elusi...](https://wolfstreet.com/2018/08/15/shale-profits-remain-elusive/)

~~~
djsumdog
So is most of the new oil coming from shale then? Or is a lot of it coming
from hydraulic injection (fracking)?

~~~
2trill2spill
Fracking is the technology used to extract shale oil and gas.

------
8ytecoder
This ignores the fact that Saudi Arabia has a large spare capacity that it
doesn't deploy - except when it's absolutely necessary.

[https://www.reuters.com/article/us-oil-opec-saudi-
trump/can-...](https://www.reuters.com/article/us-oil-opec-saudi-trump/can-
saudi-arabia-pump-much-more-oil-idUSKBN1JR1HI)

~~~
ChristianBundy
That's right. This article is about the production of crude oil, not
necessarily the capacity for production.

------
ddebernardy
Good on them. But what a sorry state to be in, when global warming and sea
level rise related problems already are a reality in Miami or - of all places
- Norfolk's naval base.

~~~
singularity2001
10 cm are already a problem? did I miss some news / tides?

~~~
astrodust
A) It's a foot compared to historical levels, it's 10cm since the 1990s.

B) It's a constant problem in Miami where high tide is now above the level of
many roads so they've had to jack the roads up several feet more.

C) Venice, Italy is routinely flooded because of sea-level rise and it's only
getting worse.

~~~
singularity2001
ok 30 cm is a lot.

one thing that I don't fully understand yet: there were always storm surges
above 2m (?) how come that 50cm sea-rise without any storm surges are already
causing problems?

~~~
mikeash
An extreme event that happened once every few years (or decades) might be
tolerable, and become a vastly larger problem if it starts happening once a
month instead.

New York recovered from Sandy, but the city would need massive changes if that
water level became routine.

------
patfla
That's odd. The gwfp.com link says:

"the Permian region in eastern Texas and western New Mexico,"

that's got it backwards actually (western TX and ...).

And the _current_ EIA's Short-Term Energy Outlook (reference by gwpf.com) says
nothing about either Russia or Saudi Arabia.

I'd question the gwpf's research.

The latest weekly US production figures are here:

[https://www.eia.gov/petroleum/weekly/crude.php](https://www.eia.gov/petroleum/weekly/crude.php)

(3rd chart down - look at number immediately below).

In the most recent wk, 9/7, production dropped back from 11 to 10.9.

Production for SA, Russia and the US have been nip and tuck for a while and
(provided capital and markets hold up) the US will likely surpass the other
two - but maybe not just yet.

------
bjourne
Meanwhile and in other news, MCC:s carbon clock indicates that we just
shattered the 1.5 degrees warming limit. [https://www.mcc-
berlin.net/fileadmin/data/clock/carbon_clock...](https://www.mcc-
berlin.net/fileadmin/data/clock/carbon_clock.htm) (Calculations according to
IPCC:s most probable scenario).

------
dbatten
Not that I doubt that they're right about this data point, but interesting
choice of source... appears to be some sort of climate-change-denial
organization?

~~~
colechristensen
The link is to something maybe questionable, but the information source is the
EIA, the same graph is on the front page of
[https://www.eia.gov/](https://www.eia.gov/)

~~~
e12e
<sarcasm ahead /> Isn't that some sort of climate-change-denial organization
now?

I wonder if this mean the US will stop making war on oil rich nations, and
instead have to contend with invasions now? Would certainly be a change.

(in all seriousness, I'm not advocating wars of agression on anyone - for
natural resources or other reasons)

~~~
colechristensen
More like another Russian revolution dragging in old satellites or a regional
war in the middle-east.

Less wars of aggression and more overthrowing the powers which were held there
by oil profits. Mix in world powers trying to "help" and we've got something
coming.

------
jedberg
As much as I hate to admit it, a lot of the credit for that goes to George W
and Dick Chaney for pushing for local production.

------
bigodbiel
i still have the feeling that the next big bust will come from the fracking
industry by 2020. The reserves are vastly overestimated, profitability muddled
by financially wizardry, and capital flow about to get squeezed as interest
rates rise.

~~~
greedo
Fracking is actually far more resilient to market swings than traditional oil
fields/wells. If prices for crude/natural gas drop, you just shutdown the
well. Spinning it back up is far faster and cheaper than normal wells.

~~~
alach11
I work in the O&G industry and I think this is backwards. You're far more
likely to see conventional wells be choked back or shut-in during price drops.
That is what we saw in the recent oil price drop.

With unconventional wells (horizontal fracked wells) decline rates are so high
that you will see a dramatic decrease in production by simply stopping
drilling of new wells.

------
tim333
There was an interesting article The Next Financial Crisis Lurks Underground
[https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/01/opinion/the-next-
financia...](https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/01/opinion/the-next-financial-
crisis-lurks-underground.html)

arguing:

>...fracking could not have taken off so dramatically were it not for record
low interest rates after the 2008 financial crisis. In other words, the
Federal Reserve is responsible for the fracking boom.

>Frackers haven’t proven that they can make money. “The industry has a very
bad history of money going into it and never coming out,”

and that it may not be sustainable.

~~~
CompelTechnic
If we are talking strictly about the economic measures going into a business
decision, using (cheap QE) debt to finance capital expenditures was a good
idea. The profit being made off of the capex justifies it well. It is not
unsustainable in the sense of a business decision.

~~~
tim333
The article argues much of the industry may not be profitable on using normal
accounting and:

>the public markets have been valuing fracking companies not based on a
multiple of profits, the standard way of valuing a company, but rather
according to a multiple of the acreage a company owns.

A bit like valuing dot coms on eyeballs rather than GAAP profits. It all
depends on oil prices and the like I guess though.

~~~
panzagl
There's a difference between a company being profitable (revenues>income) and
being profitable to investors (stock goes up). Oil companies are profitable,
but bad investments, especially long term.

------
40acres
There is not much here about whether or not the US can sustain this position
long term but in the short term this development puts in an advantageous
position geopolitically. NATO is very reliant on Russian oil and if the US is
a top producer we can export more to Europe, although Russia will most likely
remain the preferred exporter.

Also, this allows us to have a more aggressive stance with Saudi Arabia,
especially when it comes to their disastrous human rights record in Yemen.
Although the issue with that is that the current administration has shown no
interest in SA's human rights record and defense contractors would lobby
strongly against any sort of stirring of the relationship.

~~~
jessaustin
_...their disastrous human rights record in Yemen._

"Their"? That should be "our". Every bomb and bullet says "Made in USA", and
has since 2015. Oh and of course we've also had troops there since then as
well. Who in either branch of the mainstream party do we expect to pressure
KSA about the atrocities in Yemen? How about the media? Oh, wait:

[https://fair.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/MSNBC-Yemen-
Dani...](https://fair.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/MSNBC-Yemen-Daniels.png)

------
verelo
I take pleasure in knowing that on another timeline the US is a truly great
nation that has managed to completely remove its dependency on fossil fuels,
and is now switching its focus to helping poorer nations do the same.

It’s just a shame we are all stuck on this timeline...good for them though!

~~~
drblast
Hey now, oil is fantastic. The U.S. will be able to use the proceeds from this
bounty of natural resources to fund an excellent public health system, just
like Norway!

~~~
verelo
Watch out, jokes get downvoted, this isn’t Reddit ;)

~~~
hutzlibu
Depends on the intellectual level of the joke ...

------
sgillen
Looking at China and India, I forget how big the US actually is compared to an
average country. Same goes for our abundant natural resources which we don’t
really talk about much (in the media at least).

~~~
endorphone
I'm curious what you mean relative to China. China is almost the same size as
the US (10 million square kilometers) as the US, though of course normal
distorted projections make the US look much larger.

~~~
jamiek88
With over a billion people! That’s the point the US is huge, massive urban
areas and modern wealth yet it’s old fashioned commodity wealth is still
massive.

Easy to forget the sheer scale.

------
dekhn
Daniel Yergin is an energy analyst who has written several good books on oil
and energy, The Prize and The Quest. The Prize is a history explaning how to
got to 1990. And The Quest explains how we got to 2011. By the end of The
Quest, you will understand how we got to here. Why Russia is a major natural
gas provider to Europe. Why Venezuela's economy is collapsing. Why Saudi
Arabia may follow. And mostly importantly, why the US is now one of the top
energy exporters in the world (TL;DR we have tons of resources and the capital
and business structures to exploit them).

Right now the US seems to be using oil exports to weaken other countries,
rather than banking the oil and exploiting it when supply starts to dry up. I
also think that some methods aren't long-term a good idea.

~~~
jseliger
_Right now the US seems to be using oil exports to weaken other countries,
rather than banking the oil and exploiting it when supply starts to dry up. I
also think that some methods aren 't long-term a good idea._

I will second the book recommendations and I will also note that by far the
best thing the U.S. can do in the short term is switch to electric and plug-in
hybrid vehicles. (And I mean "vehicles" in the broadest sense, including but
not limited to cars: [https://www.vox.com/the-
goods/2018/9/10/17631318/electric-sc...](https://www.vox.com/the-
goods/2018/9/10/17631318/electric-scooters-bird-city-regulations-
sustainability)). That will cut the influence of bad political actors
considerably. And almost everyone can, as individuals, take important steps in
that direction.

~~~
djsumdog
Purchasing an electric vehicles causes more pollution than simply driving your
exiting vehicle if it's relatively fuel efficient.

Drive your current car until the wheels fall off and then, if you have to buy
a hybrid or electric, try to buy used.

~~~
pmwhite
That was my conclusion, too. The personal economics and the carbon footprint
correlate surprisingly strongly. The CO2 costs of hybrids look attractive on a
5-6 year timescale, but it gets bad when the environmental costs of a new set
of batteries get factored in. People underestimate the various costs of the
vehicle itself, and how they look over a longer haul.

I just threw in the towel on my 20 year old vehicle for a new small gasoline
engine car. I figure my odds of getting >12 years out of this vehicle are
quite high.

Maybe the picture will be very different in 10 years, with improvements to
battery technology. But today I stayed away from the hybrids and electric
vehicles, for both fiscal and environmental reasons.

------
ksec
I am going to side track the discussion a bit, what are the implication of
this to Petrol Dollar as the world's reserve currency?

One of the reason US dollar is being used as reserved is its absolute
influence / Protection in Oil and OPEC. Now US is producing more Oil than
anyone else, China is buying more from and start to settle those deals in RMM,
what happen next?

------
byebyetech
So if USA is producing so much oil why is it not able to pay for things like
Healthcare? Presumably oil coming out of the ground is free. Where is that
money going?

~~~
craftyguy
> So if USA is producing so much oil why is it not able to pay for things like
> Healthcare?

We have 'better' things to spend money on, like 'defense' (/s).

> Presumably oil coming out of the ground is free.

It's not free, it costs money to discover, extract, transport, process into
anything usable, transport again, etc.

> Where is that money going?

Probably the companie(s) that discover, extract, transport, process,
transport, etc. And their shareholders. And politician friends.

~~~
WillPostForFood
The US spends plenty on health care, we just don't get good value. Medicaid
and Medicare alone are 1.5x defense spending.

------
icc97
As a side note, the GWPF (Global Warming Policy Forum / Foundation) is a
climate change denialist organisation set up by Nigel Lawson (UK politician of
the Thatcher years) [0]:

> On 23 November 2009 Lawson became chairman of a new think tank, the Global
> Warming Policy Foundation, a registered education charity, involved in
> promoting climate change scepticism.

[0]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nigel_Lawson#Position_on_globa...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nigel_Lawson#Position_on_global_warming)

~~~
dang
We changed the url from [http://www.thegwpf.com/the-united-states-is-now-the-
largest-...](http://www.thegwpf.com/the-united-states-is-now-the-largest-
global-crude-oil-producer/) to the government page it points to (where by
"pointing to" I mean copying).

------
viburnum
Thanks, Obama.

------
kavabean
This is a political disaster. Fracked crude is only profitable because the
externalised costs of the catastrophic environmental damage are born by
others.

This is another direct wealth transfer from the general population i.e. 99% to
the 1%.

If instead of allowing fracking we invested massively in renewables we'd have
more jobs, a path to much-cheaper-than oil energy, and we wouldn't be leaving
toxic residue all over our water tables to make our children and grandchildren
sick with any number of diseases.

As usual capitalism is taking the quick easy cash with large externalities
because they aren't affected by them.

~~~
dv_dt
Fracked crude might not even be first-order profitable. There is an assertion
here by a book author being interviewed that the fracking industry is largely
not long-run profitable and that only low interest rates allowed them to run
speculatively at all.

[https://www.marketplace.org/2018/09/11/economy/economics-
fra...](https://www.marketplace.org/2018/09/11/economy/economics-fracking)

This was new to me, and I don't really know if it's a correct assessment. But
it's very interesting to mull over. I wonder if anyone has other information
in this vein?

~~~
nwsm
I'm not seeing where he says they are not long-run profitable, only that the
oil industry is hard to predict, which has been obviously true for decades.

American shale plays can be profitable down to $40/bbl

~~~
dv_dt
The author is a she, and when she says this:

"And what fascinated me about this industry is it doesn't make money. These
companies lose billions of dollars. They've never produced free cash flow.
They're really dependent on Wall Street's willingness to fund them. "

That's where I made the interpretation that the idea being presented here is
that fracking is not long-run profitable. So I now have to wonder, when
"profitable" at $40/bbl is quoted, does that might mean some form of
operational profit but not payback of capital layout - or maybe not including
debt service or equipment wear out if she's talking about free cash flow.

------
crunchlibrarian
Energy independence achieved.

Except it hasn't been at all, because much of the oil is more profitable to
sell and refine abroad than use domestically. So if we actually wanted to
force independence we'd need to prohibit companies from exporting their oil.

I doubt that's ever happening. Watch the "energy independence" talking point
evaporate now that the new millionaires have been minted. It's almost as if
that's what it was always about, isn't it?

~~~
saryant
We're energy independent in the 1970's sense, which is when the term
originated. We are no longer subject to the sort of oil embargo OPEC initiated
in 1973 over Western nations' support of Israel, because the West now has
sufficient capacity to plug any gap in supply.

~~~
phyller
I'm not sure about that. The US still consumes a lot more than it produces. It
might be the largest oil producer by a little, but it is the largest oil
consumer by a lot. Looks like, net of exports, US production needs to rise
several million barrels a day more to be really capable of meeting its own
supply. Unless you are thinking of other Western countries that have enough
surplus to cover the difference for the rest?

Relevant data:
[https://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/pet_sum_snd_d_nus_mbblpd_m_cur....](https://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/pet_sum_snd_d_nus_mbblpd_m_cur.htm)

------
francisofascii
The word "producer" is misleading. No new oil is being produced. Should be
largest "Extractor." Too bad. Wouldn't it be better to buy from other
countries and leave your reserves in the ground? In the future, once all the
easy to extract oil is gone, the US will have to buy from abroad at
potentially higher prices.

~~~
21
It's not the US extracting (or buying) oil, it's private companies. Who can
make a profit today.

