LifeItself

In the last few days, two top newspapers in the U.S., The New York times on the left and The Wall Street Journal on the right, have come up with unusual predictions of the future oil might of our fair United States of America.  I tried to link to the "Report Predicts U.S. as No. 1 Oil Producer in a Few Years," by Elisabeth Rosenthal, published on page B1 of The New York Times on 11/13/2012, but this link did not exist. I guess, Ms. Rosenthal's article belongs to the category of All News Fit to Sweep Under the Rug . The unsigned agitprop piece in The Wall Street Journal: "Saudi America - The U.S. will be the world's leading energy producer, if we allow it,"  dated 11/12/2012, still adorns the Web. At best, the authors of these two articles have shown a lack of rudimentary understanding of what is needed to increase oil production in the U.S. to the short-term levels implied by their narratives. At worst, they purposefully misled readers. Even the already b...

Before I discuss the logic behind negating a peak of production of anything, let me sum up where we are in the U.S. in terms of crude oil production.  According to the Energy Information Administration (EIA): "The United States consumed 18.8 million barrels per day (MMbd) of petroleum products during 2011, making us the world's largest petroleum consumer. The United States was third in crude oil production at 5.7 MMbd. But crude oil alone does not constitute all U.S. petroleum supplies. Significant gains occur, because crude oil expands in the refining process, liquid fuel is captured in the processing of natural gas, and we have other sources of liquid fuel, including biofuels. These additional supplies totaled 4.6 MMbd in 2011." Let me parse this quote.  First, let's look at the history of oil production in the U.S., shown in the chart below.  The vertical axis is scaled with a unit of power, exajoules (EJ) per year, very close to quadrillion BTUs (qu...