Friday, January 15, 2010

Where Does the U.S. Buy Its Oil? - Major Security Issue


As consumer gas prices nudge up towards $3 a gallon again, The Center for American Progress (courtesy of The Business Insider Green Sheet) published the featured map detailing where America currently buys its oil (outside North America).
On a sober note, America buys more than $360 billion of non-U.S. oil annually, much of which comes from the U.S. State Department formally designates as "dangerous or unstable" countries.
Two years ago America imported about $150 billion of oil from these same countries.
The Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI) estimates that America today imports between 9-10 million barrels a day. During the first global Energy Crisis (when OPEC nations openly used what was labeled "the oil weapon"), America imported about 3-4 million barrels a day, less than half of today's totals. Issues related to that 1973-1974 global crisis nearly spawned a direct Soviet-America confrontation.
According to RMI, "In 1999, oil was $16/barrel. In 2008, it crossed the $140/barrel mark. No consensus yet exists on exactly why the price has jumped so much. Options range from growing demand in India and China, to political instability to shady oil financial trading."
Regardless of why, (and as U.S. Senator Richard Lugar has been proclaiming for two decades) continued U.S. oil dependency remains a major Homeland Security issue.
At the first Lugar/Purdue Energy Summit in 2006 (four years ago), scientists and researchers called for a U.S. energy technology emphasis on the scale of the 1940s Manhattan Project. That was four years ago. Where are we today?

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