A Canadian newspaper claims the boom in U.S. oil production spells peril for Canadian crude.
According to The Globe and Mail, the United States is now staring at an energy future awash with its own crude, with far-reaching consequences for Canada's oil sands, the U.S. economy and global geopolitics.
Dan Kish, senior vice president for policy at the Institute for Energy Research (IER), agrees the U.S. is seeing a boom in production -- but not because of the federal government.
"The Congressional Research Service did a report recently that said that 96 percent of the increase in oil production from 2007 until now has been on non-federal land, and the federal government owns more land -- when you include the offshore, considerably more land -- than the non-federal lands in the United States," he tells OneNewsNow.
Kish adds that that the U.S. already supplies more oil than Canada, but we consume a significantly larger amount. As for the Keystone XL pipeline, Kish points out that the delay for that project actually slows down development of their oil fields, which he says is part of the reason why opponents are trying to stop the pipeline from happening.
Last week, a House Energy and Commerce subcommittee held a hearing that examined how much energy could be produce and projected that the United States will become the largest oil producer in the world by 2020, provided the government does not stop that from happening.
"The United States is the second largest [producer of oil] in the world, very recently surpassing Russia in terms of production," Kish says. "We are the number-one producer of natural gas in the world, and we've got the number-one coal supply in the world. But China produces much more coal than we do and consumes almost four times as much coal as we do."