One of the Republican campaign constants is that the Republicans during the Trump administration made American energy independent, while the Democrats under Biden have reversed course, both making the U.S. dependent once again on foreign sources for oil and causing inflation in oil and gas prices. I read an interesting article on Politico yesterday on this topic. Here are some of the statistics cited in that article:

1. U.S. oil production is at an all time high this year at 12.8 million barrels a day and is expected to grow to 13.1 million barrels a day in 2024. As late as 2008, the U.S. was producing only about 8 million barrels a day.
2. Of this, today about 3 million barrels a day comes from drilling on federal lands, while during the Trump years, this figure was never higher than 2.75 million.
3. This makes the United States the world leader in oil extraction; we are also the leader in natural gas production.
4. Oil prices are not the result of American policies. Increases in American production will not make this country independent in terms of oil prices. A gallon of gasoline nation-wide is now at about $3.87 (up about 30 cents from where it has been most of the year, but down from its 2020 high of slightly over $5.00).
5. Oil prices are controlled by world-wide events – European bank policies, OPEC policies, Russian sanctions, Russo-Ukraine War, climate change.
6. The United States both imports and exports petroleum, but it exports more than it imports. Even so, about 40% of the oil we use in the U.S. is imported.

Nevertheless, Politico points to recent Republican campaign utterances blaming Biden, and only Biden, for the high prices of oil (Pence), stating that she will bring oil production back to the U.S. (Haley), and asserting that Biden has “shut down energy production in America” (Scott).

The Republicans like to talk about American energy independence, saying that Trump made the U.S. independent, and Biden has seriously backslid. I ran across an article in Forbes from May 2023 that talks about this. Forbes agrees with Politico that we produce more oil than we consume and consequently export more than we import. But we import quite a bit, because our refineries are best able to refine the heavy oils produced elsewhere, rather than the thinner, shale oils produced here, so one type of petroleum is imported to refine here, and the other exported to be refined elsewhere.

So what does energy independence mean? Does it mean that we shouldn’t have to import any oil to meet our needs? Or does it mean that we simply export more than we import? Forbes makes it clear that, if you define energy independence as not importing any oil at all – we have not been energy independent for many, many decades, not even during the Trump years when we were still importing over 9 million barrels of oil every day. But if you are talking about simply producing more oil than we consume as the definition of energy independence, we did become “energy independent” during the Trump years. But this is not because we reduced our importing of oil from abroad; it simply meant that the vast increase in shale oil production which hit its stride about five years ago (2019) increased our exports, so that our exports for the first time in recent years began to exceed our imports.

So the Republicans, when they are referring to the Trump years use one definition of energy independence (exports over imports) and when talking about the Biden years, use the other (how much we import only). Apples and oranges.

I decided to look a little deeper and I went to Wikipedia. Wikipedia lists the top 97 oil producing countries (#97 is Spain which accounted for 19 barrels of oil last year; go figure): Yes, the U.S. is first, followed by Saudi Arabia and Russia very close behind. There is then more than a 50% drop-off to get to Canada, the fourth largest producer, with Iraq right behind as #5. The United States last year, according to Wikipedia, produced about 11.8 million barrels.

An article from the Center for American Progress from 2022) looks at this from another angle. It states that American producers own sufficient land, and have sufficient unused drilling permits (about 9000), to increase oil production any time they want, but they believe that they are operating at a very high record profit level, and that their executives and shareholders are very happy receiving high salaries and dividends, rather than have the companies major continue major investments in new drilling locations. The oil companies can, according to the article, increase production whenever they choose to, and this has nothing to do with whether Biden or Trump is in the White House. (By the way, to complement this, another article, this one from the American Oil and Gas Reporter, says that the U.S. (followed by Russia, Saudi Arabia and Canada) holds the largest amount of untapped oil reserves, another fact not often discussed)

And all these articles point out that nothing that U.S. politicians could do would make the cost of oil in the country independent of world-wide ups and downs.

So, the conclusion? The Republicans, by talking about apples and oranges as if they were simply interchangeable fruit, have created some great campaign talking points that are, as so many of their talking points are, made without concern for truth.

But, don’t the Democrats have a problem, too? President Biden’s campaign promised a sort of green revolution, moving away from fossil fuels, something important to the progressive wing of the Democratic Party (and it seems to the world at large). So, if he responds to the Republicans using the statistics contained in this article, he runs the risk of alienating these important voters. Biden can’t simply show that the United States was not independent under Trump, but was importing 9 million barrels a day, and today we are even importing more, and in addition we are also producing more than was ever produced in the Trump years and next year we are going to producing even more oil than we are today. This would be Biden, perhaps truthfully, saying that he is doing Trump better than Trump did.

Or maybe he can say this, assuming that these statistics are correct and this is true. Maybe he can say that the greening of America (Charles Reich’s phrase) will take some time, and our first goal is to increase solar and wind power and to decrease and end coal mining. Once we do this, we can concentrate on reducing the use and the export of petroleum.

Maybe all branches of the Democratic party could accept this, and maybe even some who aren’t Democrats could credit Biden with being truthful to the American people.

Articles cited above:

1. U.S. Energy Independence Soars to Highest Level in Over 70 Years, by Robert Rapier, Forbes Magazine, May 2, 2023.
2. America is Going Through an Oil Boom – And This Time It’s Different, by Camila Domonoske, NPR, June 9, 2023
3. List of Countries by Oil Production, Wikipedia
4. 5 Reasons Why the United States Can’t Drill Its Way to Energy Independence, by Jenny Rowland-Shea, Sally Hardin and Miriam Goldstein, Center for American Progress, March 10, 2022
5. Reserve Estimates: U.S. Holds Most Recoverable Oil Reserves, by Per Magnus Nysveen, The American Oil and Gas Reporter, July 2016.
6. The U.S. is Pumping Oil Faster Than Ever; the Republicans Don’t Care, by Ben Lebvre, Politico, August 28, 2023