Energy Aware
The United States is energy independent. Banning oil exports would lower oil prices. Strategic Petroleum Reserve releases lowered gasoline prices. There is a shortage of refinery capacity in the U.S. The cancelation of the Keystone XL Pipeline has limited U.S. oil supply and contributed to higher energy prices.
These popular memes are wrong.
The U.S. is not Energy Independent
The U.S. produced about 11.3 mmb/d of crude oil in 2021 and imported about 6 mmb/d of crude oil per day. That doesn’t sound very energy-independent.
When politicians and journalists talk about American energy independence, they’re not really telling the truth. They’re playing with truth. The energy independence meme confuses oil and refined products. They’re not the same. Let me review the facts.
The U.S. is a net importer of crude oil. U.S. net imports of crude oil averaged 2.9 mmb/d in the first seven months of 2022 (Figure 1 blue fill). That’s way down from almost 9.4 mmb/d during the same period in 2001, and moving in the right direction but it’s hardly energy independent.
The U.S. is a net exporter of refined products. Net exports averaged 5.9 mmb/d in 2022.
The problem arises when crude oil and the products refined from it are combined. That’s the blue curve in Figure 3 and voila. A country that imports more oil than Europe uses, magically became a net exporter in October 2021.
…click on the above link to read the rest…
