ARLINGTON, Va. – For the
first time in nearly four decades, the United States is sending more oil away
from its shores, Bloomberg News reports. America’s oil surge is the result of
technological improvements such as fracking, which has lead to booming
production that could overwhelm refineries soon, said Benjamin Salisbury, a
senior energy policy analyst at FBR Capital Markets Corp.
Net petroleum imports have
dropped from 60% in 2005 to around 40% of demand today, according to the U.S.
Energy Information Administration (EIA). Domestically, production pushed out
766,000 barrels daily, a record amount. “Americans are unbelievably politically
sensitive to oil and more specifically to gasoline prices,” said Salisbury.
“For politicians to do anything, the pain has to come first. You have to see
the rig count fall and then and only then can we have a decision about whether
we want to export crude.”
Currently, around 120,000
barrels of crude per daily makes its way to Canada via a U.S. Department of
Commerce license. Oil exports need to increase in order to meet demand by a
upswing in U.S. production, said Robin West, chairman of PFC Energy. EIA
forecasts that U.S. oil output is on track to pass Saudi Arabia as the world’s
biggest producer of crude oil within seven years.
“It’s a fairly short
period of time, it’s a couple of years, before we effectively hit the wall,”
said West during a recent conference. “That will start affecting price, which
in turn will start affecting production.” From 2007 until now, the amount of
oil imported into the United States has dropped.
However, U.S. citizens may
not like the idea of sending U.S. crude oil overseas, given the concern over
pump prices, said David Goldwyn, president of Goldwyn Global Strategies LLC.
“You’ve got to have an answer which is either it’s going to bring down the
price at the pump by a dime if we let this happen or some other positive.”