U.S. Net Imports of Oil and Petroleum Products

Since I put up charts showing the decline in net oil imports into Spain, Italy, Japan, Greece... I thought I should take a look at the U.S. given its status as the world's largest importer. Data from the U.S. EIA.

For those following the presidential election: Don't you think one of the candidates would have thought the above data/graph was important enough to speak on? For True Believers of the liars of either side, there is nothing much a president can do about 4 million barrels per day of petroleum gone missing at the import docks.

The U.S. is in the fortunate position of being able to increase domestic production somewhat (an increase of 500k to 600k bpd from the bottom in 2008, but only 300k increase in total crude and condensate from the Peak Total Year of 2005) of crude and condensate and to be able to go from essentially zero ethanol to over 900k bpd. (Depletion never sleeps: take a look at Alaska production in that link.)

Imports of petroleum and petroleum products declined by 4.1mm barrel per day, peak to trough. The astounding thing is that "peak to tough" is really "peak to date" - and that is only 7 years. This outcome I had forecast just about right. Of course, I very much underestimated the increase in Shale Oil production and ethanol which increased liquid transportation fuel by 1.2mm. While, this left the U.S. with a 2.8mm bpd liquid fuels deficit from the peak (not taking NGPL's into consideration here since they are not transportation fuel for the most part, but they increased about 300k bpd, see EIA link immediately above), fracking technology did wonders. Without the increase availability in Nat Gas this very bad recession might have been disastrous.

Of course, both the rate of change in declining oil imports should slow (if that rate of decline, averaging -600k bpd every year for the past 7 years, for imports doesn't slow you can expect economic armageddon of some sort) and the rate of change in the increase in ethanol and tight oil will slow. I will see if I can model that using EIA's projection of tight oil peaking at about 1.2mm bpd in 2030 or so and little increase in ethanol production (the U.S. is already consuming about 45% of the corn crop in the form of ethanol) with some guesstimate of future imports.

As I look at the above graph I have to say that I am impressed with how well the U.S. handled the decline in Oil imports. As I said before, I may have to change the name of my blog to the European Energy Crisis, because compared to Europe, the U.S. is in the pink.

I am putting up these graphs because I keep seeing articles about all of the Oil we have left, or have discovered, or will discover... I can't help but wonder as to the motivations of those behind these stories.  "Jeffers Media Theory" says that no story makes its way into the MainStream Media unless it is bought and paid for, so... who is behind this and what do they want? The graphs I have been putting up tell a story, a story in complete contravention to the stories in the media. I prefer hard data.

I will put up graphs shortly, if I can find data, of Oil imports into China and India. I guess some blogger in this space should do a calculation on total imports by all the importing nations and check the EIA and IEA data for accuracy, but between the farm and the kids I just don't have the time. Anybody want to tackle it? You can publish it here. I prefer data like California's taxable gasoline consumption or the U.S. Dept. of Highway's Vehicle Miles Travel Data to taking Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, or Iraq's word on their exports.

More soon.