There's an item on the front page of reddit this morning which lauds the fact that the USA is now producing more oil, condensates, ng liquids and natural gas than any other country on earth, having surpassed both Saudi Arabia and Russia recently.
I am sure that this is great cause for rejoicing and celebration.
I have to admit, Harold Hamm has done a pretty amazing job out there in North Dakota. Recently I saw an opinion piece which upped the estimates of total crude production from the Bakken from 1 mmb/d to 1.3 mmb/d for next year and upped the peak prodution estimates to 2 mmb/d. That is very, very impressive. Concomitantly, profitable production is still expanding in hithertoe-ignored places such as the Permian, the Denver basin, and the Marcellus. With all of this new internal production, imports of foreign oil have fallen to levels not seen in the whole lifetimes of half our good citizens.
As I have said before, one of the catalysts or causes of this growth has been the ultra-low interest rates, the cheap cost of capital, engendered by the Federal Reserve, for better or worse.
What I want to write about this morning is our choices of friends out there in the globe....and our choices of enemies.
Among the so-called "first world" countries, the most advanced technically, there are certain nations which are outstanding in their internal energy poverty, in their needs to import energy. The first on that list has to be Japan. The second has to be Israel. Other prominent members are Great Britain, France,
Spain, Italy, Germany, the Netherlands. Those nations are all quietly approaching economic desperation as unit energy costs increase.
Among the rest of the world there are certain nations which stand out as energy-exporting nations.
A list of the most important of these will certainly include Canada, Saudi Arabia, Russia, Iran, Venezuela, Iraq, Kuwait, Libya, Angola, Khazakistan, and some other smaller players.
Now US foreign policy has frequently treated Canada as if it were our little sister, pulling her pony tail and poking her at the dinner table, then telling mom and dad that she started it. Meanwhile we have been perpetrating on going, steady, consistent, deliberate, ugly aggression and hostilities, for generations, towards most of the other members of that list.
Why? Exactly how stupid are we? Do I need to spell this out, what the ultimate results are going to be? The Bakken is not going to last forever, folks....
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