U.S. world's largest oil producer at over 20 percent.

SC Maintenance said:
Yes but they used to say we were going to run out of oil, or USA had run out of oil. But magically now were the largest producer again.

The problem with believing the "experts". They always talk their book.
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To be honest, it was horizontal well drilling coupled with horizontal well fracking technology that saved the bacon of the American oil industry.
 
GON said:
This chart caught me a bit by surprise. The chart's producer is a middle east based media conglomerate.

The U.S. produces over twenty percent of the world's oil. Wow. Wonder if the U.S. can double that number, and be a key worldwide exporter to help with the trade deficits.

View attachment 285391
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Why would private US oil companies want to double oil production when demand hasn't doubled? That would just tank the price of oil which means they do the twice the work for half the money. This seems to get lost in translation often. US oil producers don't want to sell us cheap oil and they don't want to maximize oil production. They want to maximize the efficiency with which they produce oil to reduce costs and they want to produce just enough oil to meet demand and maximize profits.

This was the primary issue with previous US government attempt to increase oil production in 2018. All it did was crash the price of oil and put a bunch of small US oil producers out of business - see The Great Oil Crash of 2018.

https://oilprice.com/Energy/Oil-Prices/Why-Oil-Prices-Rose-And-Crashed-In-2018.html
 
dishdude said:
Exactly, only certain refineries can convert different types of crude into gasoline.
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Any only certain grades of oil are reasonably economical or thereby possible to make into gasoline......like what oozes out in UAR and Saudi.
 
Snagglefoot said:
To be honest, it was horizontal well drilling coupled with horizontal well fracking technology that saved the bacon of the American oil industry.
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Yes, American Tech saved America again, necessity being the mother of all inventions. And in other news, the sun rose and water is wet.

Maybe in 100 years we will identify the deposit from space and just beam it up?
 
alarmguy said:
We have roughly 50 billion barrels of oil reserves (about #9 in the world) and maybe even more with fracking.
We also have the 4th largest natural gas reserves in the world.

Never mind, someone posted it right above this post *LOL*
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USGS says we have 4.2T barrels in the Green River formation alone. It is the largest proven deposit on Earth...by orders of magnitude, but it is never mentioned or used in the figures ranking world oil reserves.
 
thastinger said:
USGS says we have 4.2T barrels in the Green River formation alone. It is the largest proven deposit on Earth...by orders of magnitude, but it is never mentioned or used in the figures ranking world oil reserves.
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I agree. I think we have some of the largest but thought I would get in a discussion from some pushback and I dont have the time I used to here*LOL*
I see no mention of all the reserves that can be accessed by fracking too, anyway, I agree and though I read about much larger reserves that can be accessed at one point..
 
SC Maintenance said:
Yes but they used to say we were going to run out of oil, or USA had run out of oil. But magically now were the largest producer again.

The problem with believing the "experts". They always talk their book.
Click to expand...
In the old days, the oil came gushing out of the ground, often under its own pressure. Recoverable reserves using the technology of the past left 2/3 of the oil unrecoverable. What we are now recovering, due to newer "fracking" techniques, is the oil that was originally left behind by the old technology.

But there is only so much oil down there. Once it is gone, its gone. Or what little is left behind is so expensive to recover, its not worth it.

The oil presently recoverable by fracking costs about $40 a barrel to recover. So, when the price of oil falls below that level, you make no money extracting it. I think part of the reason why we have so many embargoes on oil producers such as Venezuela is, if they were allowed to freely sell their oil, our Permian Basin producers of fracked oil would be driven out of business.
 
Hohn said:
This is obsolete thinking. You aren't exporting your energy. You are trading a less valuable item for a more valuable one. It's called profit.
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Sorry I'm not with that program
 
k1xv said:
In the old days, the oil came gushing out of the ground, often under its own pressure. Recoverable reserves using the technology of the past left 2/3 of the oil unrecoverable. What we are now recovering, due to newer "fracking" techniques, is the oil that was originally left behind by the old technology.

But there is only so much oil down there. Once it is gone, its gone. Or what little is left behind is so expensive to recover, its not worth it.

The oil presently recoverable by fracking costs about $40 a barrel to recover. So, when the price of oil falls below that level, you make no money extracting it. I think part of the reason why we have so many embargoes on oil producers such as Venezuela is, if they were allowed to freely sell their oil, our Permian Basin producers of fracked oil would be driven out of business.
Click to expand...
Its between $60 and $70 / barrel, depending on what field and who you believe.

And big oil has bought out all the shale wildcatters. What the wildcatters did was run around and drill holes, wireline test them, and cap them. They didn't have the capital to produce from them. They then sold themselves to bigger companies who in turn sold themselves to the supermajors. So what you have is a bunch of big oil finally producing from all these wells.

Your right in that it will run out at some point - but my point is they have been saying this my whole life - and usually with a hidden agenda. There are lots of known reserves and there are more being found everyday. Lastly, the world population has peaked and oil use is already declining.

Also I would suspect oil, like many other technologies will be rendered obsolete eventually. Just not today.

So saving it might not be all that important either.
 
We can produce more but we probably won't due to a few reasons:

Our cost like deep water drilling is high, costing $60 seems about right. If we start drilling and piss off OPEC they may retaliate with extra production to crash the price and bankrupt our drillers. They are at an equilibrium and in a truce is probably better.

Oil is traded in USD and it is fiat. If I can buy something today with money in the future that's inflated away, I would too. It is cheaper this way than the other way around.

Extra shipping cost of extra production to where? We probably consume most of the oil we drill within N America but if we drill too much we have to ship them to Europe or Asia, the cost would probably make it not worth the extra production. I can understand the natural gas export because of the war in Ukraine and Iran's situation but shipping there is not the best use of our production.
 
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