All along the highway that leads into this city in West Texas, the rows of black pump jacks seem endless, bobbing up and down as they pull crude oil from beneath the parched scrub desert.
The pump jacks have long been here, in good times and bad, a symbol of this city’s long status as the heart of America’s petroleum industry. Even when U.S. oil production was dropping and many feared the Permian Basin, which feeds Midland’s oil economy, was all but exhausted, the pump jacks continued their work – even when the result seemed hardly worth the effort.
Now, their up and down motion seems all but unstoppable, a symbol of an energy revolution that seems likely to transform the globe.
“Everything has changed,” said Jim Henry, 78, who’s worked in Texas’ oilfields most of his life .
A surge in U.S. oil production has in just a few short years propelled the United States from a country largely dependent on oil imports to one that soon could become the world’s top oil producer. The goal of North American energy self-sufficiency, the holy grail of American politics since the Arab oil boycott of 1973, seems to be within grasp.
The revolution has taken place almost unnoticed – and in a way that few foresaw less than a decade ago, when the emphasis on breaking America’s foreign oil dependence was almost entirely on persuading Americans to drive less, turn the thermostat up in the summer and down in the winter, and open protected areas to oil exploration.
No one, it seemed, foresaw what actually happened – a production revolution that in the past five years has seen the amount of crude oil produced in the United States shoot up 40 percent, after declining every year for the previous 20. The International Energy Agency predicts the United States will overtake Saudi Arabia as the world’s top oil producer by the year 2015. America already has become the largest producer of natural gas.
In October the United States started producing more oil than it imports for the first time since 1995.
Read more: MIDLAND, Texas: Fracking-led energy boom is turning U.S. into ‘Saudi America’ - Nation - MiamiHerald.com
The pump jacks have long been here, in good times and bad, a symbol of this city’s long status as the heart of America’s petroleum industry. Even when U.S. oil production was dropping and many feared the Permian Basin, which feeds Midland’s oil economy, was all but exhausted, the pump jacks continued their work – even when the result seemed hardly worth the effort.
Now, their up and down motion seems all but unstoppable, a symbol of an energy revolution that seems likely to transform the globe.
“Everything has changed,” said Jim Henry, 78, who’s worked in Texas’ oilfields most of his life .
A surge in U.S. oil production has in just a few short years propelled the United States from a country largely dependent on oil imports to one that soon could become the world’s top oil producer. The goal of North American energy self-sufficiency, the holy grail of American politics since the Arab oil boycott of 1973, seems to be within grasp.
The revolution has taken place almost unnoticed – and in a way that few foresaw less than a decade ago, when the emphasis on breaking America’s foreign oil dependence was almost entirely on persuading Americans to drive less, turn the thermostat up in the summer and down in the winter, and open protected areas to oil exploration.
No one, it seemed, foresaw what actually happened – a production revolution that in the past five years has seen the amount of crude oil produced in the United States shoot up 40 percent, after declining every year for the previous 20. The International Energy Agency predicts the United States will overtake Saudi Arabia as the world’s top oil producer by the year 2015. America already has become the largest producer of natural gas.
In October the United States started producing more oil than it imports for the first time since 1995.
Read more: MIDLAND, Texas: Fracking-led energy boom is turning U.S. into ‘Saudi America’ - Nation - MiamiHerald.com
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