U.S. crude production rose to the highest level in a quarter-century as a shale drilling boom in states such as Texas and North Dakota cut the need for foreign oil and pushed the country closer to energy independence.

The U.S. pumped 8.075 million barrels a day in the week ended Dec. 6, a gain of 0.8 percent, or 64,000 barrels a day, the Energy Information Administration said today. It’s the most since October 1988.

“You can’t swing a cat without hitting a barrel of oil in North America,” saidStephen Schork, president of the Schork Group Inc., an energy consulting firm in Villanova, Pennsylvania. “It’s amazing how quickly things can change.”

U.S. oil output grew 18 percent in the past 12 months, the fastest pace on record, boosting fuel exports and reducing reliance on imports, according to the EIA. The boom will make the country the world’s largest producer by 2015, five years sooner than last year’s forecast, the International Energy Agency in Paris said last month.

 

David Fuller's view

Remember growing up with all those stories about how we were going to run out of oil, to the point of being impoverished and sitting in the dark?  They persisted right into the 21st Century.  People are still inventing reasons to avoid tapping their natural resources, and paying much higher prices for their energy.  Who benefits from that?

Technology is everything.  It improves our livelihoods, as most of us know.  We have only begun to see how it can reduce pollution, because that challenge was not sufficiently prioritised previously.