Comb, Baby, Comb!
February 29th, 2012 - 8:39 am
“I have many friends in Saudi Arabia and other countries and they can’t believe what they’re getting away with,” Trump said. “They can’t believe how stupid we are. We don’t need Saudi Arabia.”
“President Obama has not seen fit for [energy to be] a major agenda. Obamacare was a major agenda,” said Trump, referring to the president’s health-care plan. “If he spent one-third of the effort on energy we wouldn’t even be bringing oil in.”
I hate waking up and having to agree with Donald Trump first thing in the morning.
On the other hand, he seems to be falling into a trap common to people who remember the OPEC Embargo era.
The trap is overestimating how much oil we get from the middle east.
Latest EIA numbers (as of Dec. 2011) show that we get over twice as much oil from Canada as from Saudi Arabia.
Indeed, Canada supplies us 3/4 as much oil as all of OPEC (90kbbl vs. 126kbbl).
It’s not like importing oil is a giant gift to the House of Saud – if we didn’t buy it, the EU and China would. At most, they’d make marginally less because the price of oil would drop a bit.
But that’s it.
Oil is fungible and in great worldwide demand. We can’t starve out the Islamists by drilling our own. We might well want to just to make energy cheaper, but that’s another matter.
(I also don’t think Trump’s right about “we wouldn’t be bringing oil in”.
Right now, the US produces 173mbbl/month, and (net) imports 8.3mbbl/day. Doing the math, we find about 240mbbl/month imports, for a total consumption of something like 410 mbbl/month.
Getting from 173 to 410 would require more than doubling, which I just don’t think is realistic over 3 years, even if the President had pushed it.
We might well be pumping more, and on track to not import, but I don’t think we could be there yet, realistically.
After all, the President can’t do things by executive fiat as much as he might like; Congress is funny that way.)