Thoughts on Oil

I recently reread the book “Oil on the Brain: Petroleum’s Long, Strange Trip to Your Tank” by Lisa Margonelli.  Published in 2008, the reader is taken up the American gasoline supply chain - gas station, fuel haulers/wholesalers, refinery, drilling rig, Strategic Petroleum Reserve, NYMEX, Venezuela, Chad, Iran, Nigeria, and China - digging into all the details you may have questioned but never bothered to investigate.  It’s a good read and worth the time if you have it.  Recent comments by President Trump about “keeping” Middle East oil (here, here, and here) piqued my interest and is what motivated me to pick up Lisa’s book again. It got me wondering, whatever happened to oil?

If you recall, in the early 2000s there seemed to be an obsession about peak oil and its subsequent geo-political ramifications (of the 10 documentary films referenced on the ‘Peak Oil’ Wiki page, all were released between 2004 and 2008).  But over the past ten years the oil conversation has vanished from the national conversation (at least in the media).  I did some quick research on the EIA’s site and pulled the following two graphs.

Graph courtesy of the EIA.

Without getting into all the science behind petroleum, we can clearly see between the two graphs that American domestic production has increased (1,829,000 barrels in 2008 and 4,011,000 in 2018) and crude imports have decreased (4,727,000 barrels in 2008 and 3,629,000 barrels in 2018).  The idea of becoming more reliant on foreign oil has at least, for now, been deferred due to expansions in unconventional domestic oil production. With that deferment comes the alleviation of fears and as such, we’ve stopped talking about it.  As a finite natural resource however, we will no doubt pick this conversation up again in the next 10, 20, 30 years or so.

Graph courtesy of the EIA

Back to the book…

In the Iran chapter, the author interviews an unnamed individual who is “on the outs with the regime.”  Through their comments we can infer the individual is informed and had high(er) level access within the government.  She states:

My host worried that as oil fields around the world are depleted, leaving the bulk of supplies in the Middle East, the world’s wrath will turn here.  “Things will start to get crunchy,” he says with a grin.  “If I’m right, finding oil will be an enormous problem for the U.S. suburbia,” he says.  “They are the most important socioeconomic community on this planet, and they are not going to take the destruction of their way of life lying down.  They have an enormous power to change American politics – everything is possible.  Maybe even an end to democracy.  Forget about nuclear weapons and terrorism.  I am very worried about the explosive power of panicked suburbia.”

This statement has stuck with me and was the impetus for writing this post.  Is it not true?  Are American suburbanites the least politically motivated yet most powerful constituency in modern society?  What happens when the level of comfort in suburbia falls?  How does this idea reflect on our policies and governance?