by Greg Noth
A new study conducted by the energy consulting firm IHS CERA and sponsored by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the American Petroleum Institute, American Chemistry Council, and Natural Gas Supply Association finds the U.S. is on track to become the largest oil producer in the world.
Oil and other liquid carbon production is expected to reach 10.9 million barrels per day (bpd) this year, which is a 7 percent increase from last year. By next year, the Department of Energy projects the country will produce an average 11.4 million bpd — just below the 11.6 million bpd produced by the largest oil producer in the world, Saudi Arabia.
This study, which the Chamber happily endorsed, proves that attacks from the right against the Obama administration’s domestic energy policies — often led and funded by the Chamber of Commerce — are completely false. Indeed, production has increased every year of Obama’s presidency and this year is the largest single-year gain since 1951.
Compared to the last three years of President Bush, there have been 241 million more barrels of oil produced from public lands in the first three years of President Obama. Also, the number of oil drilling rigs have seen a 75 percent increase between 2009 and 2011.
Even though the Chamber acknowledges energy production is high, the organization and other oil-funded groups have spent millions this election cycle running attack ads, some repeating energy myths about the government limiting production. Its campaign narrative does not match reality.
Oil production is now higher than at any point since the mid 1990′s. Yet, despite these massive gains in production, gas prices have remained “stubbornly high.” This is because the global market determines prices, and factors outside U.S. borders control them — not presidents.
According to a recent analysis from the Congressional Budget office, the only way to truly protect consumers from price increases is to promote “policies that reduce the use of oil.” And that’s what we’ll need to do in order to address climate change as well.
The Chamber continues to attack Obama on energy. But the group is already getting the energy policy it wants, as this recent report it sponsored points out. Meanwhile, gas prices remain high and we continue on a path of uncontrolled carbon pollution.
Greg Noth is an intern with ThinkProgress.
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The Oil Industry doesn’t like Obama for these reasons:
1. He hasn’t joined the cult of climate change denial.
2. He promotes alternative energy to the hilt.
The oil majors aren’t happy with just increased drilling. They want everyone to be beholden to fossil fuels with no hope for an alternative. Then, when climate change gets worse, they can say ‘see but there’s nothing else available to use.’ A situation they dearly want.
Just one more point to add, as I worked at ACC for a little while.
CERA tends to produce the most optimistic supply estimates and take very few of the depletion issues into account. Further, they conflate natural gas liquids, ethanol, and oil production. These products aren’t the same. Nor can they be used for the same purpose.
Natural gas liquids can only be used as fuel if put through a very intensive refining process and turned into diesel. For the most part, though, this fuel is non-fungible with oil. Crude oil is the most readily useful and can be turned into a huge range of products. Ethanol can only be used as motor fuel and currently requires corn as a feedstock.
1 million barrels per day of the total liquids number comes from ethanol and other biofuels. A bit more than 2 million barrels per day comes from natural gas liquids. US crude oil production is about 6.13 million barrels per day. All this added together gets us slightly more than 9 M/bpd. The rest comes from refinery gain, because we refine such a huge volume of fuel in this country.
So about 4.8 million barrels per day of the total given isn’t crude oil.
The US would have to produce about 9 million barrels per day of crude oil to beat out Saudi or Russia — which flip back and forth as top producers.
For my part, I’d rather see more in the way of second gen biofuels production for the US. But, as a better definition, we are almost as much of a refining and biofuels power as we are a major oil producer. And, if we are to hope to deal with the problem of climate change, we should lean much more to the former and avoid the latter as much as possible. In short, we’re really crazy to keep ramping up development of the stuff.
Before you trust Daniel Yergin to get the important things right, Google Daniel Yergin predictions and check out the first dozen or two links. Not a great record.
Whenever DY makes a big splash with public puffery, you can count on 3 things. First, the details behind the headlines are fenced in behind all sorts of paywalls and/or registrations to entice you onto somebody’s marketing lists. Second, the optimism will gloss over any contrary evidence, totally missing the point about EROEI and the devastating feedback between oil problems and the world economy. Third, there will be nothing thoughtful about what even Yergin would have to call the inevitable decline of oil production, once it unequivocally occurs, nor about what to do with all the CO2 if anything close to his sunshiny scenario actually happens.
Using the freedom of speech via AGW, we learn the reason why the Chamber and GOP calls them Red States – “2012 Wildfire Season Hits 2nd-Largest Area Since 1960s” (By Douglas Main, OurAmazingPlanet Staff Writer; msnbc.msn.com, 10/24/12).