Author: Mike Cline, T/X Resources
This plot illustrates a disturbing, long-term trend for the U.S., towards an increasing dependence on imported oil (includes crude oil, and natural gas liquids) to meet our current consumption levels of over 21 million barrels per day (over 892 million gallons)—more than it’s ever been.
Put another way, we currently consume over two decent-sized, domestic oil fields per day!! While consumption (purple graph) has been steadily increas- ing since a low in the early 1980’s, domestic production (blue graph) has been declining since the mid 80’s. Since then, we have been importing an increas- ing amount of crude oil, as evidenced by the diverging trends. Since March 1993, over half of our total domestic consumption of oil, has come from foreign sources—we currently only produce about 32% of the oil we consume.
See the larger Adobe Reader pdf file.
Fortunately for the U.S., crude oil and natural gas plant liquids (NGPL) only comprises about 19% of our total energy production, currently at just over 6 Quadrillion Btu’s per month, according to the latest available figures from October 2007. However, while coal, natural gas, nuclear, hydroelectric, geo- thermal, and a few other renewable energy sources, provide our remaining energy requirements, many of these still cannot be used as a direct substi- tute for oil.
March 2008 marks the 35th anniversary of the the Arab Oil Embargo of 1973 (many of you may not have even been born then), and we are still just as vulnerable as we were then, if not more so!
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