Free Republic

President Donald Trump’s America First energy policy has catapulted the United States to the world’s largest global crude oil producer, according to the Energy Information Administration (EIA). EIA’s Short-Term Energy Outlook (STEO) report states preliminary estimates show the U.S. feasibly overtook Saudi Arabia and Russia to become the top crude oil producer earlier this year. The report notes U.S. crude production in February outstripped Saudi Arabia’s for the first time in over 20 years. Further, U.S. crude production in June exceeded Russia’s crude oil output for the first time since February of 1999. EIA data signals the U.S. will maintain...

The impending oil renaissance in Alaska’s North Slope is going to be even more massive than previously projected. The oil lurking under the surface of the historically oil rich region is enough to turn the state’s economy around and reinstate it as a major player in the oil industry, according to new research from IHS Markit, a London-based global information and analytics provider. The study shows that the North Slope’s crude output could increase by as much as a whopping 40 percent in the next eight years, more than regaining its place as one of the major powerhouses of the...

In terms of its effect on the lives of Americans, as well as the economy, the change of U.S. policy announced by the Trump administration last month to almost no media attention is a big deal. Ellen Knickmeyer of the Associated Press picked up on it belatedly: Conserving oil is no longer an economic imperative for the U.S., the Trump administration declares in a major new policy statement that threatens to undermine decades of government campaigns for gas-thrifty cars and other conservation programs.

... The event I refer to is the drilling of the first well which would use hydraulic fracturing to crack shale rock, thereby releasing the gas beneath the rock. Put differently, it was 20 years ago that “fracking” was born. ... The volumes of natural gas, natural gas liquids, and crude oil that this technique has uncovered all over the country have been unfathomable, and over the last decade alone has caused the United States to more than double their crude oil production on an absolute basis, and to surpass Russia and Saudi Arabia in production on a relative basis....

Rather than saving people money in gas costs, cleaning up the air, or dealing with the climate crisis, the Trump administration announced its plan to roll back automobile fuel efficiency standards -- proposing to freeze the policy in a few short years. Since cars and trucks are the largest source of carbon pollution in the United States, the existing regulations are crucial in the effort to stop the climate crisis. Limiting pollution for cars is also important for human health, because dirty air from cars is bad for all of us. We know the public will lose from this rollback....

The success of this marriage would unlock oil in tight oil and shale oil deposits that had previously been too expensive to recover, and would result in one of the greatest oil booms the world had ever seen. In fact, the "fracking revolution" caused U.S. oil production to turn upward in 2009, and then rise over the next seven years at the fastest rate in U.S. history. While it is still true that OPEC still produced 42.6% of the world's oil in 2017, the majority of new oil production since 2008 has come from the U.S.It is hard to overstate...

The American Petroleum Institute (API) released its monthly statistical report on Thursday, revealing the highest-ever production of U.S. crude oil and natural gas liquids in June. During that month, production of crude oil hit 10.7 million barrels per day (mb/d), and production of natural gas liquids hit 4.2 million barrels per day, . “Record production of U.S. crude oil and natural gas liquids last month highlighted the strength of our nation’s energy renaissance,” Dean Foreman, API chief economist, said in the announcement of the report. “U.S. oil production has supplied all of the growth in global oil demand so far...

Plunging drilling costs have sparked an explosion of production out of the Permian Basin of West Texas. In fact, Texas is pumping so much oil that it will surpass OPEC members Iran and Iraq next year, HSBC predicted in a recent report. If it were a country, Texas would be the world’s No. 3 oil producer, behind only Russia and Saudi Arabia, the investment bank said. “It’s remarkable. The Permian is nothing less than a blessing for the global economy,” said Bob McNally, president of Rapidan Energy Group, a consulting firm… “The industry cracked the code on fracking,” said McNally....

HOUSTON--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Jul 11, 2018--Titan Production Equipment has officially opened for business, completing its acquisition of Exterran Corporation’s North American production equipment business. The new company plans to scale up quickly, aiming to become the market leader in the design, engineering and manufacture of oil and gas production equipment used to separate, process and treat hydrocarbon streams – including glycol regeneration dehydrators, as well as two- and three-phase separators. This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20180711005433/en/ Designed for high-volume, complex manufacturing, Titan Production Company's Columbus, Texas facility is one of the largest of its kind in the...

WASHINGTON - The Trump administration is asking U.S. allies around the world to lower their level of oil imports from Iran to zero by November 4th of this year, a senior U.S. Official said on Tuesday. The official added that the administration isn't planning to produce any waivers that will exclude certain countries or companies from this requirement. "We are pushing allies to cut oil imports to zero by November," the senior official said. "We view this as one of our top national security priorities." Talks on this demand have been ongoing for recent weeks, but the senior official said...

People over 50 remember the OPEC oil embargoes and Americans waiting in line to buy gasoline. We were the most powerful nation the world. We had won World War II, rebuilt Europe and Japan. Yet, here we were begging some faceless Middle Eastern Sheiks for a few gallons so we could get to work. It was both frustrating and humiliating. The answers we got from our political leadership were pathetic. Yes, they authorized farmers to start making ethanol and gave tax credits to the big refineries to get them to blend it. Congress created a Department of Energy to look...

If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor. If you like your health plan, you can keep your health plan. If you like the surgery you’re about to receive, you can get the surgery you’re about to receive. Yes, that’s the latest cost-cutting measure that’s about to hit Obamacare recipients. In California, according to the American Spectator, they’re going to start cutting funds to hospitals that perform too many surgeries. How many is too many, of course, is whatever the nearest bureaucrat says that it is. “Covered California, the state’s health insurance marketplace under the Affordable Care Act,...

.S. President Donald Trump on Friday directed Energy Secretary Rick Perry to take emergency steps to keep at-risk coal and nuclear plants running, the White House announced. Under the directive, Perry would require grid operators to buy electricity from ailing nuclear and coal-fired power plants to keep them from being shuttered. “Unfortunately, impending retirements of fuel-secure power facilities are leading to a rapid depletion of a critical part of our nation’s energy mix, and impacting the resilience of our power grid,” White House spokeswoman Sarah Sanders said in a statement.

Texas rose by 4% to almost 4.2 million bbl/d, a record high... North Dakota held around 1.2 million bbl/d, while output in the federal Gulf of Mexico declined 1.1% to 1.7 million bbl/d. U.S. natural gas production in the Lower 48 states rose to an all-time high of 88.8 billion cubic feet per day The U.S. has been the world's biggest producer of gas since 2009, ahead of Russia.

In case you’re growing tired of waking up every morning and checking social media or reading the Washington Post and hearing about how awful everything is these days, how about some good news? The U.S. Energy Information Administration has finished compiling all of the production numbers for last year and determined that America was the global leader in production of both petroleum and natural gas. And in terms of who else was in the hunt, it wasn’t even close.

Trump Opens Door to Dangerous Fracking in Northern Arizona A new Trump administration plan proposes to auction off 4,200 acres of public land for oil and gas development in northern Arizona. The lands straddle the Little Colorado River, are within three miles of Petrified Forest National Park, and are near habitat for a federally threatened fish called the Little Colorado spinedace. Drilling and fracking would threaten to deplete and pollute groundwater in the Little Colorado River Basin. The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) is planning the September auction—which would convey development rights to fossil-fuel companies—without any site-specific public or environmental...

U.S. crude oil production could top 12 million barrels per day by the end of 2019, according to the latest Energy Department (DOE) forecast released on Tuesday. The U.S. Energy Information Administration, the DOE’s statistics arm, (EIA) projects U.S. crude output would grow by more than 1.5 million barrels per day over the next two years, primarily as the result of abundant shale oil and gas reserves. EIA projects the U.S. will “average 11.9 million [barrels per day (b/d)] in 2019, 0.4 million b/d higher than forecast” the agency released in April. Now, EIA “forecasts U.S. crude oil production will...

As global oil markets shift their attention from U.S. shale oil production back to a resurgent Saudi Arabia and Russia and geopolitical concerns bearing down on oil prices, Citigroup said last Wednesday that the U.S. is poised to surpass Saudi Arabia next year as the world’s largest exporter of crude and oil products. The U.S. exported a record 8.3 million barrels per day (bpd) last week of crude oil and petroleum products, the government also said Wednesday. Top crude oil exporter Saudi Arabia’s, for its part, exported 9.3 million bpd in January, while Russia exported 7.4 million bpd, the bank...

I have argued many times on these pages and elsewhere that the shale oil and gas revolution is the story of the decade. Since 2007 U.S. oil and gas output has risen by about 75 percent, and the renaissance is still in its infancy stages. This year the surge in domestic energy production has further accelerated, in part due to higher world prices for oil (approaching $70 a barrel) and to massive drilling operations in rich oil patches, such as the Permian Basin in Texas and the Bakken shale in North Dakota. The Energy Information Administration reports that the U.S....

The first patient I saw during my clinical rotations as a medical student was dying from chronic myeloid leukemia (CML). Today, with treatment, the 5-year survival rate for CML is about 90%. But when I was a student, CML was incurable. It was an early and poignant reminder of the limitations of medicine that I have never forgotten. We didn’t understand cancer like we do now, nor did we have the tools to treat it, which meant there was agonizingly little we could do. With the national hospice and palliative care movements only beginning, our discussions with this man and...