No, BP, the U. S. did NOT surpass Saudi Arabia in oil production
If they had asked questions, they would have ended up with a ho-hum headline announcing that last year Russia at 10.1 million barrels per day (mbpd) and Saudi Arabia at 9.7 mbpd were once again the number one and number two producers of crude oil including lease condensate (which is the definition of oil). The United States at 8.7 mbpd remained in third place.
The most important question they could have asked is this: How is BP defining oil? It turns out that oil according to the BP definition includes something called natural gas liquids which includes lease condensate–very light hydrocarbons that come from actual oil wells and are included in the oil refinery stream–and natural gas plant liquids which come from natural gas wells and include such things as ethane, propane, butane and pentanes. Only a small portion of natural gas plant liquids are suitable substitutes for oil.
Production of natural gas plant liquids in the United States has grown rapidly as a result of increasing exploitation of natural gas in deep shale deposits, so-called shale gas. These liquids are useful, but they are not oil and only displace oil in a minor way. Moreover, their energy content is around 65 percent that of crude oil and so counting barrels of natural gas plant liquids as equivalent to oil is doubly misleading.
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