Should the United States Import or Export oil?

I accept the challenge to debate the export of oil from the U.S. in the position against exporting oil from the U.S.

My main mode of approach will be to point out the obvious that the U.S. consumes far more oil on a yearly basis than it produces; meaning that the need to import oil will always be a factor unless we drop our internal demand for oil by more than 60%. At this point we would approximately be able to support our own oil needs as of 2011. This also assumes no growth in our demand (and, since there is little in the way of alternatives to this material in its current usages, this will mean a significant constriction on our economic growth)

Further I will point out that this situation should act as a wake-up call to find alternatives to petroleum which are less ecologically damaging.

I would like to thank Joe12 for starting this debate and establishing the primary point of contention in the first round.

According to the BP "StatisticalReview of World Energy 2011" (among the most comprehensive sources of data on energy usage and production available) in 2011 the U.S. produced 7,513,000 barrels per day of oil while consuming 19,148,000 barrels per day (1). As such if the U.S.were have exported its oil it would then have had to import that much more oil.

In the 1950's an energy analyst, M. King Hubbard estimated the U.S. would hit a peak of oil production sometime between 1965 and 1970. By 1971 the U.S. had indeed hit "peak oil" (2). After this time the U.S. has never produced more oil and in fact has steadily produced less.

As to Pro's discussion of the Canadian pipeline as I understand that that would be tar sands brought into and through the U.S. Hardly making it an "exportable" material for the U.S. but rather the U.S. acting as a "transshipment" point.

I heartily agree with Pro's suggestion of increased renewables which is clearly something the U.S. needs to explore moreso. However that is not part of the debate as introduced in the First Round.

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SOURCES:
1. BP Statistical Review of World Energy 2011 http://www.bp.com...

2. http://www.energybulletin.net...

The ideal of America securing better more environmentally rational energy sources and also decreasing its profligate use of energy is indeed a very good idea.

However sticking with the original point of the debate that the U.S. should export its oil has been shown that, all things being equal, that would be mathematically impossible without decreasing our petroleum consuption by about 60% percent or more.

I would like to move onto a subtext brought out by Pro's most recent argument: the idea of increasing petroleum production in the U.S.

Firstly: most oil is not extracted by "digging" as joe12 states. It is an interesting aspect to some of the first oil used by people was "mined" in that small pits were dug near seeps and the petroleum that collected in them was taken out.

However oil is almost always "drilled" for these days. That being said the petroleum from tar sands and oil shales would be "mined" ("dug") but what this usually is is something called bitumen or kerogen which are heavier, tarry or more solid organic materials than petroleum. When organics are trapped in a rock and the rock buried sufficiently the organic material undergoes various changes and fractionations. The lighter liquid hydrocarbons are often squeezed out of the "Souce" rock (something like a shale, perhaps) leaving behind the heavier less mobile material. The lighter fluid hydrocarbons and gas move out and migrate to a RESERVOIR rock, like a sandstone for example. They hit something that stops their advance (perhaps an overlying bed of shale or similarly less porous, less permeable rock) and then accumulate. The oil wells tap into this reservoir and pump the oil out. In many cases the gas that accumulates with the petroleum migrates to the top of the formation and provides some amount of assistance to getting the oil out of the ground when the oil well is placed.

The petroleum industry in the U.S. is among the most advanced in the world with massive technological advances that have allowed us to be the leaders in oil exploration. Some of the most advanced methods of finding oil have been developed in the U.S. Our expertise helps other countries find their oil, and many other countries have oil to find.

We, however, have less and less of our own oil to drill for. The estimates of any given "oil play" in the U.S. are usually rather low compared to places like Saudi Arabia. We have a great deal of natural gas and coal, but oil we are running out of.

As pointed out earlier the amount we produce has steadily decreased for the past 41 years, but not for lack of trying to find more. That is what is meant by "Peak Oil".

There are some off-shore deposits which we could exploit and indeed we are in many cases. However the U.S. is somewhat hypocritical in that we want our oil but we do not like to endanger our coastlines. Offshore oil got a huge black eye in California when, in 1969, the Santa Barbar oil spill was among the first large scale environmental disasters. And we've seen in the ensuing years other disasters such as the BP DeepHorizon spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

But we are not shying away from our own oil. We still produce and the Gulf of Mexico is still an active area to drill.

The U.S has very little oil we can easily extract, and those areas where oil can be isolated or stripped out of oil shales represent a much worse environmental alternative to drilling. The energy and water needed to get oil out such formations is prohibitive and the hallmark of energy desperation.

The potential for environmental impact from petroleum production is always present. I think that it is clear that both Pro and I generally agree that this is problematic and something to be avoided. Further it makes sense that these events shoud be used to make us think about re-assessing our "addiction" to fossil fuels.

However, again, the primary point of the debate is whether the U.S. should export its oil. I believe that it is clearly a matter of what the current state of affairs is. Merely suggesting that we export oil without a concommitant decrease in our consumption of oil is, at best, doing nothing of value.

Furthermore, let us assume that the oil we export is not offset by an increase in our imports; let us assume we actuall do decrease our oil dependency by a massive amount. Are we not then only feeding the same types of problems elsewhere in the world?

America has a primary role right now as a "consumer". We are a massive consumer of all things. Gluttonously so. To that end we are the problem right now. Our needs to moderate our appetites are of direct importance to the rest of the world.

Exporting what tiny bit of oil we actually still direct control over will do nothing. It is not an answer unless the point is to make us aware of how little of this depleting natural resource there is and to get us to moderate our intake.

It is avery interesting point that Pro raises in the final round; and indeed it is true that recently the U.S. began exporting more gasoline than it used. However that appears to be a somewhat distinct point from the original proposition that joe12 made that the U.S. should export it's oil.

Remember: gasoline is a refined product made from oil. America still uses more than twice the amount of oil that it produces, meaning that, mathematically, we must import oil. We do still have a wide variety of crude oil processors who take the oil and produce the lighter hydrocarbons such as gasoline that we use.

In reading through some of the material available in the news about our status as net exporter of gasoline may be due to our status as a manufacturer of gasoline.

But the economics of gasoline "import and export" is more complex than simply "net values" in the U.S. NPR provides some insight into the U.S. as both a gasoline importer and exporter in a recent article. It is pointed out that much of th petroleum produced in the U.S. is refined into gasoline in the South while on the East Coast they are unable to meet demand with the gasoline pipelines coming up from the South, meanwhile the South is able to export some of its gasoline. In the words of the NPR article: "The United States is both an exporter and an importer of gasoline at the same time. It's like we're two different countries." (1)

The business of making gasoline also means that the companies that refine crude into gasoline have a mixture of sources of the input crude oil. A recent example as outlined in an article in the "24/7 Wall Street" (2) explains that some refiners are working to boost their profit margins thusly:

"

Crude at Gulf Coast refineries is priced at the Brent crude import price, no matter where it comes from. Refineries in the US interior are typically able to get the vast majority of their crude at or below domestic the WTI [West Texas Intermediary] crude price. Today, a barrel of Brent costs about $121, and a barrel of WTI costs about $106. That $15 difference in feedstock pricing pays dividends at the refinery. ...

To boost margins at Gulf Coast refineries, Valero and the others are exporting more refined products, both gasoline and the higher-priced diesel fuel. ...

The secret to making a profit in refining these days is for refiners to source crude oil domestically and then sell the refined products to US consumers at prices based on imported oil. Valero can't do that, but Marathon, Tesoro, and HollyFrontier can. ..."

In short the U.S. is still importing huges amounts of CRUDE OIL, but because demand internally in the U.S. for gasoline and other REFINED products of that crude oil have dropped our massive refinery capacity in the U.S. can now start exporting refined product (3).

So in summary, while the U.S. desperately needs to curb its energy consumption, we are, as of now, still a net importer of oil. Our demand inside the U.S. is dropping as gasoline and fuel prices go up, but we still do not produc sufficient oil to merit the idea that we could be a net oil exporter. While we can still export the materials produced from the oil, almost half or more of which we import.

I thank Joe12 for a good debate and am indebted to him for the information about our role as an exporter in 2011 of more gasoline than we imported. This has been very enlightening for me.



SOURCES
1. http://www.npr.org...
2. http://247wallst.com...
3. www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=10&ved=0CIQBEBYwCQ&url=http%3A%2F%2Fmoney.cnn.com%2F2011%2F12%2F05%2Fnews%2Feconomy%2Fgasoline_export%2Findex.htm&ei=Mm-UT_ePE-iC2gXB4bjxBA&usg=AFQjCNG6On9c8Adj0QF_STw35_T6wvW1ng