As long as I can remember, the conversation surrounding oil in America has been intense. Politicians just love talking about drilling, falling back on foreign oil, and promising energy independence. It’s easy to believe, based on how true this topic gets discussed, that we’re running out of this oil. But let me tell you, I couldn’t have been more wrong.
In fact, over the past decade, the U.S. has more than doubled its oil production, even to the extent that it took back its mantle as the world’s largest oil producer. So, why is America still so dependent on foreign oil? The answer is both simple and complicated; let’s dive into it.
Early Days of American Oil
For more than 150 years, the U.S. was the king of oil production, drilling almost all our oil and powering our rapid industrialization with it. By the 1930s, however, it became clear that other countries-most significhantly those in the Middle East-had huge stores of the stuff. Saudi Arabia started drilling like crazy, and pretty soon the U.S. started importing oil.
Initially, these imports were small in number; however, America’s insatiable appetite for oil, to fuel its planes, trains, and automobiles, soon outstripped what we could produce on our continent. We needed more oil from the outside to maintain our lifestyles as we then knew it. Then came 1973, and the game changed.
The Oil Crisis of 1973
In 1973, we supported Israel in the Yom Kippur War. With that, Saudi Arabia and other Arab countries slapped an oil embargo on us. Suddenly, our gasoline stations were considered empty. We had no oil to adequately keep this country moving, gas stations closed down, and President Nixon had to ask businesses to cut back on energy use to survive the winter.
That was when the term “Energy Independence” really took off. It was clear that we were too reliant on foreign oil, and Nixon even banned oil exports in an attempt to try and keep what little we had. We still needed more oil to keep our economy going, though.
Enter Fracking: America’s Oil Revolution
So people used to think for a long time that America was running out of oil. But it just so happens that, well, we had plenty; we just couldn’t access it. Deep underground, these kinds of rocks exist called “shale” that trap oil and natural gas. The problem had been how to get it out efficiently.
That’s where fracking came in: water and chemicals get pumped into the ground, and drill sideways instead of straight down, companies were able to crack open these rocks and release the oil. The technique wasn’t new, but in the early 2000s, it finally became cheap enough and fast enough to use on a large scale. Resulting from such a factor, from 2008 to 2018, U.S. oil production skyrocketed.
We were again on top.
The Refining Problem: Why We Still Need Foreign Oil
So if we’re producing all this oil, why are we still importing so much? That’s because American oil isn’t always the right “type” of oil for our refineries. Think of oil like chocolate and strawberry ice cream. For a long time, the U.S. produced chocolate oil, so we built refineries to process chocolate oil.
But now, with fracking, we’re pulling up a lot of strawberry oil. And the problem is, our chocolate refineries can’t process that. Instead of spending billions to update our refineries to process strawberry oil, it’s cheaper for oil companies to just keep importing chocolate oil from other countries. They can then ship our strawberry oil overseas, where other refineries can process it.
That’s a crazy system, but it’s more money-making in the way that oil companies function, and that’s why the United States continues to import so much foreign oil.
Energy Independence vs. Energy Security
The thing is, as nice as it sounds, the notion of “energy independence” isn’t exactly pragmatic. We produce a lot of oil nowadays, but the world’s oil market is, in fact, an interlocking system – the U.S. couldn’t realistically just suddenly stop importing or exporting oil.
Various refineries around the country, particularly in hubs like Chicago, would go out of commission right away without their specific type of oil with which to process, and the whole system would explode. Instead, energy security is what matters. That is, we need to make sure supplies meet demand-be those from U.S. oil, Canadian imports, or renewable sources.
While we are a long way off from abandoning oil just yet, this framing of energy security gives us a direction ahead that balances those more pressing economic needs with environmental concerns. The Road Ahead: Balancing Oil and the Environment Any planned action to halt the use of oil is a dream; it is far from the ideal.
In most cases, U.S. drilling more domestic oil instead of depending so much on foreign sources would help reduce global emissions because our own production process is often cleaner. However, to really tackle climate change, it has to involve ways to leave more oil in the ground.
Until clean energy takes over, it will not happen in one night, yet it could happen sooner than it is perceived. The fossil fuel industry may resist that transition, but the world is moving in that direction. For now, the nation will continue drilling and importing oil, for now; yet the future is all about finding a balance among oil, energy security, and a cleaner world.
