re: US oil production just hit a new record high two weeks ago

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I think the unconventionals are a short-term shot in the arm

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You mean like a 30 year short term shot that allows us energy independence and a bridge to transition to alternative fuels?

Sounds about right

This is one of the reasons that the US super power status is going to not change anytime soon.

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limitless supplies of cheap energy remaining is delusional.

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I don't think anyone thinks that.

They're spending $10 billion to develop fields in 6000 feet of water to drill 20,000 feet under the sea. Into salt domes that we can't see through, at temperatures and pressures that have never been successfully completed.

It's not cheap or easy. But it is basically limitless. It's off Florida. It's off the Chesapeake Bay. It's off Alaska. We are drilling in maybe 10% of the footprint that we could be exploring. We won't run out of oil. We'll run out of political will to drill it. And we'll develop hydrogen or something else to replace it long before we run out of it.

But if we were producing 6mm bpd like in 2005, verses 13mm bpd today, how many wars would we be fighting simultaneously to secure another 5-6mm per day? Nigeria, Iraq, and Venezuela at a minimum. Oil would be $250 barrel and we would have 1 million men at arms deployed around the world trying to secure our supply. So thank God for unconventional discoveries and the innovation inspired American capitalist spirit

The oilfield is better than ever in history right now. Im heading back out tomorrow for 21 days. They just want you to believe it’s not doing well. Im working on the world’s first 20k+ psi formation pressure wells. With a four year extension for more wells!

America will be great again. It’s coming. A yankee turned Floridian and a Hillbilly coming to office. LFG

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I just think the idea that we have limitless supplies of cheap energy remaining is delusional.

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The reserves in Anwar are bigger than Saudi Arabia

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needs to go much higher... pump more

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According to who?

I thought this administration wants to get rid of fossil fuels?

The U.S. exports more petroleum than it imports. So why are we importing at all?
Crude oil exports of about 4.06 million b/d accounted for 40% of total U.S. gross petroleum exports.

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The U.S. exports more petroleum than it imports. So why are we importing at all?

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Oh boy. You just opened a can of worms.

First off, the US is still a net importer of crude oil, to the tune of ~2.5 million barrels a day.

Second, if you look at the individual import/export numbers you will see that we import about 6.5 million barrels and export about 4 million barrels of crude oil. So the question becomes “why don’t we just import the 2.5 million barrel difference?”

The answer is that US refineries are mostly built to run “opportunity crudes” - typically some combination of heavy, sour crude oil, while the US upstream production consists of a lot of light/sweet crude. Light/sweet crude is more valuable because it requires less work to refine into finished fuels. However, heavy crudes are referred to as “opportunity crudes” precisely because they trade at a discount.

US refineries leverage their infrastructure (conversion units such as hydrotreaters, hydrocrackers, catalytic crackers, cokers, etc.) to allow them to run cheap heavy oil, mostly imported from Canada. Because of the way refinery utilization works, they actually need to run this heavy crude in order to keep those conversion units running at capacity.

So as a result, the US exports light/sweet crude (sold at a premium) and imports heavy/sour crude (sold at a discount).

ETA: Also worth noting that while we are still a net importer of crude oil, we are a net exporter of crude oil + refined products. Because while we have about 2.5 million bbl/d in net crude imports, that’s offset by about 4.5 million bbl/d in net refined product exports.