Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Supporters of America’s new get-tough foreign policy are touting the country’s emerging “oil weapon” wrought from increasing production in the shale oil fields of Texas and other states. The rise of oil imports from Russia is just one sign that those supporters have the situation completely wrong.
They say that the first casualty of war is truth. And, on both sides of the fight over lifting the ban on exports of U.S. crude oil, the truth has already fallen into a coma. The ban was instituted in 1975 in order to make America less subject to swings in international oil supply after suffering the price shock associated with the Arab oil embargo in 1973.
If you want to corrupt a people, corrupt the language. Once it becomes impossible to say the truth with the language we have, it will ultimately be impossible for us to adapt and survive.
There is no U.S. oil and gas export "weapon" to aim at Russia to counter its moves in the Ukraine. The U.S. isn’t even supplying its own needs. But you wouldn’t know that from media reports and editorials in the last week.
My question to the Brits: if you could turn the clock back, would you allow all your oil to be produced at the maximum possible rate, earning the amount of export dollars you did, if it meant that within a generation you would be back to being an oil importer paying roughly five times as much per barrel?
At a 10 percent /year decline rate, in order to simply maintain a production rate of 7.5 million b/d out to 2023, the US oil industry would have to replace the productive equivalent of every single oil field in the United States of America…
