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The U.S. Just Became a Net Oil Exporter for the First Time in 75 Years:
America turned into a net oil exporter last week, breaking almost 75 years of continued dependence on foreign oil and marking a pivotal -- even if likely brief -- moment toward what U.S. President Donald Trump has branded as "energy independence."
The shift to net exports is the dramatic result of an unprecedented boom in American oil production, with thousands of wells pumping from the Permian region of Texas and New Mexico to the Bakken in North Dakota to the Marcellus in Pennsylvania.
While the country has been heading in that direction for years, this week's dramatic shift came as data showed a sharp drop in imports and a jump in exports to a record high. Given the volatility in weekly data, the U.S. will likely remain a small net importer most of the time.
"We are becoming the dominant energy power in the world," said Michael Lynch, president of Strategic Energy & Economic Research. "But, because the change is gradual over time, I don't think it's going to cause a huge revolution, but you do have to think that OPEC is going to have to take that into account when they think about cutting."
The shale revolution has transformed oil wildcatters into billionaires and the U.S. into the world's largest petroleum producer, surpassing Russia and Saudi Arabia. The power of OPEC has been diminished, undercutting one of the major geopolitical forces of the last half century.
I can see short-term benefits (avoiding another 1973 Oil Crisis), but am concerned about the long-term strategy. Given a fixed supply of oil, isn't the US just racing to deplete its resources and therefore setting itself up for a later "oil crisis"? The only hope I see is a huge and continued emphasis in transitioning to alternative energy sources (be it solar, wind, and/or nuclear) and thus ween itself from dependence on foreign supplies.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by takyon on Sunday December 09 2018, @10:08PM (27 children)
If the world mostly stops using oil within the next 50-100 years or so, any remaining reserves will be wasted.
It would be prudent to excavate and sell it now, rather than waiting for a post-oil economy. Then you can reinvest in other areas.
Saudi Arabia is a great example of this. But they threw a bone saw into the works.
Global warming isn't a concern in this scenario, because as long as there is demand it will get drilled. You could invest in batteries, solar, and fusion to help bring the post-oil economy sooner.
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(Score: 4, Informative) by legont on Sunday December 09 2018, @10:21PM (10 children)
Oil will still be needed for many applications; plastic and fertilizers come to mind first.
"Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding" - John Kenneth Galbraith.
(Score: 4, Informative) by The Mighty Buzzard on Sunday December 09 2018, @10:54PM (3 children)
Oils for plastics and such don't necessarily need to come from dead dinosaurs. That just happens to be an already available and relatively inexpensive source.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by legont on Sunday December 09 2018, @11:27PM (2 children)
Perhaps, but I wonder if it will be more environment friendly. So far any alternative to oil is either questionable or outright more dangerous than oil.
I am also very suspicious about the strategy. See, an honest way would be to implement better than oil alternatives and only then remove oil from the picture. But it is not the strategy. They are trying to prohibit oil or make it more expensive using taxes and promise that alternatives will come and will be better. I call it BS, sorry.
Note that it's everywhere. Old ways don't die because they are worse but because they are legislated out of existence. Perhaps it is good. If so we got to be honest at least to ourselves, but people prefer propaganda.
"Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding" - John Kenneth Galbraith.
(Score: 3, Funny) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday December 10 2018, @03:38AM (1 child)
Nah, there are plenty of oils produced as byproducts of agriculture that could serve a new purpose. It's not like we're going to cut back on raising food any time soon. If all else fails, there's always mandatory liposuction for the obese. Better health and raw materials with one stone!
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Monday December 10 2018, @05:54PM
If it's a one-time thing, carving is more efficient than liposuction.
If you want to make it a permanent resource, we need to invent an implantable faucet system to simplify logistics.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by takyon on Sunday December 09 2018, @11:18PM (5 children)
I think we should be making a lot of plastics from plant material. Fertilizers are made from methane [forbes.com], and not oil.
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(Score: 2) by legont on Sunday December 09 2018, @11:32PM (3 children)
I assumed that when people say oil what they really mean is hydrocarbons from fossils. BTW, even the last part - fossils - is controversial.
"Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding" - John Kenneth Galbraith.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Zinho on Monday December 10 2018, @08:40AM (2 children)
What's the controversy? No one is claiming that we're pumping oil out of dinosaur-shaped holes in the ground. The best theory about the fuel's origin is that it was produced by the microorganisms that are invariably found in source rock. Yes, microbes left behind fossils, and they can be easily identified in rock cuttings under a microscope. All that's beside the actual point; the fuel itself is the fossil. Regardless of what made it, the fuel itself is the geologic evidence of the process that created it.
fossil [merriam-webster.com]
fos·sil | \ˈfä-səl
adjective
1 : preserved from a past geologic age
//fossil plants
//fossil water in an underground reservoir
noun
1 : a remnant, impression, or trace of an organism of past geologic ages that has been preserved in the earth's crust
Unless you're somehow arguing that fossil fuel isn't preserved from a past geologic age I'm not seeing where there's room for controversy here.
"Space Exploration is not endless circles in low earth orbit." -Buzz Aldrin
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday December 10 2018, @07:37PM (1 child)
(Score: 2) by legont on Monday December 10 2018, @10:53PM
This just came out today https://phys.org/news/2018-12-life-deep-earth-totals-billion.html [phys.org]
15 to 23 billion tons of living carbon in deep earth. The bugs have life span in millions of years, very diverse, but persist everywhere.
"Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding" - John Kenneth Galbraith.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 10 2018, @05:47PM
Worth noting that pretty much any hydrocarbon chain you care to name can be created starting with syngas as the base building block (ie, methane). The cost gets pretty obscene the longer and more exotic the chain you're trying to make, but it can be done. When the oil is gone, we'll pay that cost or do without. Really is that simple.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday December 10 2018, @12:33AM (15 children)
Oil reserves are not wasted. Saving them for 1000 years or more is not wasting them, it's not even noticeable in the larger geological timeframe they have been accumulating.
Civilization has been building cities for 5000 years, just because we set aside a resource for longer than the current age of the US constitution does not mean it is wasted.
If you're thinking in terms of the remaining lifespan of the people in power, sure, but any of them who are deluded enough to think that their personal fortunes for their remaining decade or three of life should matter more than the future of the planet should be sent to Vegas to do hookers and blow for the rest of their natural life, and get them the hell away from making decisions that affect future generations.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by takyon on Monday December 10 2018, @01:00AM (7 children)
Ideally, the people of 100-1,000+ years from now will not be using much oil (outside of small, niche uses not comparable to today's consumption numbers). If they are using oil, it better be because of a post-apocalypse scenario.
Perhaps it would be better for humanity if it was sent back to the Dark Ages, but without cheap, easy-to-locate-and-exploit petroleum resources. Or maybe it would just be a different flavor of bad. But without a massive catastrophe, our civilization should reach a point where it leaves oil in the ground and uses mostly batteries, or maybe hydrogen cells, etc.
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(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday December 10 2018, @02:44AM (6 children)
I agree that the future of oil is niche, extremely small as compared to the last 50-100 years.
I disagree about batteries - almost as bad IMO, I do hope they (in their current form, at least) are even shorter lived than the internal combustion engine.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 3, Insightful) by takyon on Monday December 10 2018, @03:26AM (5 children)
Umm, everyone here has seen dozens of stories [sciencedaily.com] about new battery technologies being worked on by researchers. It seems likely that one or more of these will eventually pan out and batteries will not remain in their current form in the coming decades and centuries.
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(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday December 10 2018, @05:58PM (4 children)
Moving from Lithium to Fluorine doesn't seem like a great step on the "nasty to handle" scale, and if I infer correctly, a Lithium-Fluorine battery would be even better - energy density wise.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by takyon on Monday December 10 2018, @06:37PM (3 children)
*Fluoride [soylentnews.org]
It's just one of many contenders. If it's not safe to crash an electric car filled with fluoride-ion batteries, or carry around a phone or laptop with it, then it probably won't be used, or will be restricted to certain applications.
Although it would be fun if we realized a 10x improvement in battery energy density and all consumer electronics became like bombs.
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(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday December 10 2018, @08:36PM (2 children)
If you look back at the carbon (non-alkaline) batteries of the 1960s and leap forward to Li-Ion, I think it already looks like that.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by takyon on Tuesday December 11 2018, @07:54PM (1 child)
TSA has been very cagey over people taking laptops onto planes in recent years. They have a procedure where you need to have your laptop out during the scan, and they can get even more suspicious if you have two laptops.
So if battery energy density was to suddenly go up by 10x, I can only imagine even more draconian measures. And I'll avoid them (hopefully) by taking a car or Greyhound instead.
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(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday December 11 2018, @09:30PM
TSA really sucked all the joy out of air travel - I'm very glad that we can do substantial telecommuting now.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1, Insightful) by khallow on Monday December 10 2018, @01:15AM (6 children)
And I see you ignore economic time value [wikipedia.org] here. Yes, it is wasting those resources. There is nothing we'd be using those resources for in a thousand years, especially when adjusted for sitting on the resource for a thousand years (and moving on to non-fossil fuel resources as well), that is more valuable than what we could do with it now.
Remember the benefits and wealth of our societies accumulate over that thousand year period too. If we accumulate many such poor decisions as forgoing a valuable resource for some purely imaginary future benefit a thousand years from now, then what sort of impoverished society will we have left in a thousand years?
You're the only one displaying a hugely flawed understanding of the future beyond that remaining lifespan.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday December 10 2018, @02:48AM (5 children)
Nowhere in this thesis is there value assigned to persons not yet born, nor the value of ecosystems which are fundamental to the survival of all people. If that is not viewed as fundamentally flawed, then the future is doomed.
But, what do you care? You'll be dead.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2, Insightful) by khallow on Monday December 10 2018, @03:37PM (4 children)
There are two flaws in your claim. First, there's no point to making things worse now so that we can have a worse future as well. Way too many of the climate change fixes make high fertility people poorer now. That means more people in a worse future later. Meanwhile what we save now by not pursuing harmful and counterproductive climate change mitigation strategies goes to making a better future. Second, time value works beautifully for the very things you speak of. Assign value to these future things and you still have time value.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday December 10 2018, @05:55PM (3 children)
Name your fallacy: https://thebestschools.org/magazine/15-logical-fallacies-know/ [thebestschools.org]
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday December 10 2018, @07:33PM (2 children)
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday December 10 2018, @08:43PM (1 child)
Prescient, are we?
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday December 11 2018, @02:48AM