U.S. Breaking Foreign Oil Addiction, Report Says
By Michelle Krebs May 20, 2008As oil hovered around the record mark of $127 a barrel, the page one lead story in London's Financial Times' Tuesday featured this bold headline: "U.S. begins to break foreign oil 'addiction.'"
Based on a Department of Energy report, the article claims the U.S. is starting to break its addiction to foreign oil as more efficient cars proliferate and the use of ethanol expands, cutting the share of U.S. oil imports for the first time since 1977.
The report says the U.S.'s foreign oil dependency is expected to fall further from 60 percent to 50 percent in 2015, before rising again slightly to 54 percent in 2030. Net imports are expected to fall between now and 2030, "ending what has been an almost relentless 30-year climb in the use of foreign oil and a fall in domestic production."
"The 1970s is the last time we saw any significant decline in net import dependency in the U.S. It shows that markets do work, policy changes do work, technology does work," Guy Caruso, head of the U.S. Energy Information Administration, the statistical part of the Department of Energy, told the Financial Times.
Imports made up 57.9 percent of U.S. oil consumption in the first three months of this year, down from 58.2 last year. Although the reduction in oil demand growth is partly because of slower economic growth and a projected 1 million-barrel-a-day rise in output from the Gulf of Mexico oil fields by 2012, experts believe that government energy legislation will accelerate the downward trend of imported oil, Caruso told the newspaper.
He said the new energy act is expected to help boost biofuel production from 8 billion gallons this year to at least 32 billion by 2030, while prompting a 40 percent efficiency improvement in new cars from 2020.
The same study predicts the proportion of diesel cars in the U.S. will rise from the current 1 percent to 15 percent by 2030.
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