Today’s NY Times carried an ad from ExxonMobil that
perpetuates a myth about US energy independence. The ad featured appears on two pages. On the first it asks where the US gets most
of its energy, and answers it two pages down, from the US itself. It says, “New technologies have unlocked
abundant resources right here.” The
statement falsely gives the impression that were it not for the new
technologies, most of the US energy would have come from foreign sources.
The US has always obtained most of its energy from domestic sources of coal, oil, and natural
gas, and to a less extent from nuclear and hydropower. The US used to be a net exporter of energy,
but since the early 1990s it has been a net importer. The energy imports increased through 2005 to
32% of the total energy consumption.
Since then, energy imports have been on a steady decline such that in
2012 the US imports amounted to 20% of the consumption. In absolute terms, the US imports decreased
from 0.19 cmo in 2005 to 0.11 cmo in 2012.
The tight gas and tight oil resources unlocked by the new
technologies like horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing have brought
about the reversal in the trend, and their impact has been more pronounced on
the oil imports. The US oil imports were at their highest at 13.5 million
barrels per day (mbpd) in 2005, but in 2012 oil imports were down to 9.7 mbpd. (See my previous post of Oct. 15, 2013 for
charts and other numbers.)
