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| Fig. 1: US Petroleum Production, Consumption, Import and Exports from 1950 to 2020. Units in millions of barrels per day. [1] (Source: F. Dayton) |
The United States consumed around 18.12 million barrels of petroleum per day in 2020, or around 6.66 billion barrels total. [1] This includes crude oil, gasoline, diesel fuels, heating oil, jet fuel as well as non-crude petroleum liquids and refined petroleum products. To match this consumption, the US produced 18.40 million barrels of petroleum per day in 2020, or 6.7 billion barrels total. [1] In 2020, the average spot price of West Texas Intermediate Crude was $39.25 per barrel. [2]
In 2020 the United States imported around 2.87 billion barrels of petroleum from dozens of countries, the biggest contributors being Canada, Saudi Arabia, Mexico and Russia and exported 3.1 billion barrels to Mexico, China, Japan and India, to name the largest. [1] In 2006, by comparison, the US imported over 5 bn barrels and only exported 480 thousand barrels of petroleum. [1] Fig. 1 shows the relationship over time between US petroleum consumption, production, imports and exports. 2020 was the first year since 1949 the US became a net annual exporter of petroleum. [1] In 2006, US domestic oil production had been steadily declining for over a decade and oil imports were at record highs. Then, between 2006 and 2020 US oil production increased from 6.8 million barrels per day to 16.5 million. [1] In the same time frame, oil imports fell from 13.7 million barrels per day to less than 7.9.
In 2005, to reduce US reliance on foreign oil and to promote cleaner fuels, the US passed the Energy Policy Act under Bush. The law, among many other things, gave subsidies to domestic oil exploration and invested in US natural gas infrastructure. [3]
For the increase in oil production, its useful to look at where this increased production is From 2011 to 2021, the regions with the largest contribution to the increase in US oil production are the Permian, Niobrara, Eagle Ford and Bakken Regions. [4] Of note is that in this time period, the rig count in all of these regions decreased. [4] This implies that the remaining wells have either become more efficient at extracting oil from the ground, or they are pumping harder. It is likely a combination of both, but it is unclear the exact breakdown.
Part of the overall increase in domestic petroleum production came from an increase in natural gas production as a result of hydraulic fracturing, or "fracking". Fracking is a drilling technique where pressurized fluid is shot through small holes in the walls of the drilling tube. This fluid forces microscopic fissures into shale and other sedimentary rock which then releases natural gas. In 1970, the US produced 1.66 million barrels of natural gas per day. In 2006, 36 years later, that number had risen to just 1.71 million barrels. [1] Between 2006 and 2020, that number increased threefold, from 1.71 million barrels to 5.18 million barrels per day. [1] In line with this, the number of hydraulic fracturing drills recorded in the United States increased from around 20,000 in 1995 to over 110,000 by 2007. [5]
From a political standpoint, fracking has been recognized to increase the yield of natural gas drilling and received political support. The Trump administration leased four million acres of federal land to fossil fuel companies, signed an executive order in 2017 that rescinded a rule that regulated fracking on federally administered lands and opened the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) in Alaska for oil drilling. [6,7]
© Finn Dayton. The author warrants that the work is the author's own and that Stanford University provided no input other than typesetting and referencing guidelines. The author grants permission to copy, distribute and display this work in unaltered form, with attribution to the author, for noncommercial purposes only. All other rights, including commercial rights, are reserved to the author.
[1] "November 2021 Monthly Energy Review," U.S. Energy Information Administration, DOE/EIA-0035(2021/11), November 2021.
[2] "Statistical Review of World Energy 2021," British Petroleum, 2021.
[3] "Energy Policy Act of 2005," Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, August 2006.
[4] "Drilling Productivity Report," U.S. Energy Information Administration, November 2021.
[5] T. J. Gallegos and B. A. Varela, " Trends in Hydraulic Fracturing Distributions and Treatment Fluids, Additives, Proppants, and Water Volumes Applied to Wells Drilled in the United States from 1947 through 2010 - Data Analysis and Comparison to the Literature," U.S. Geological Survey, Scientific Investigations Report 2014-5131, 2015.
[6] "Oil and Gas; Hydraulic Fracturing on Federal and Indian Lands; Rescission of a 2015 Rule," Department of the Interior, December 2017.
[7] B. Plumer and H. Fountain, "Trump Administration Finalizes Plan to Open Arctic Refuge to Drilling," New York Times, 27 May 21.