How much tar-sands oil will be sold in the U.S. ?
Arguments that tar-sands oil will reduce American dependency on Middle East oil fail the facts test. There is now an over-supply of crude sitting in midwestern storage tanks, thereby depressing the cost of oil. U.S. imports for 2010 were 86% of their all-time high in 2005. The oil companies’ solution is to export the excess, which will drive the price back up. Tar-sands crude will not help our economy, it will not provide energy independence, nor will it result in less Middle East oil imports because we have already turned away from OPEC and Persian gulf sources, which last year were only 82% and 62% of their respective all-time highs.
For more details, see our post: U.S. Oil Imports. A Short History.
Data on U.S. petroleum imports was downloaded from U.S. Energy Information Administration spreadsheets. http://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/hist/LeafHandler.ashx?n=PET&s=MTTIMUS1&f=A
The Piper's file is a concatenation of EIA’s three spreadsheets obtained from the EIA on total imports, Persian Gulf imports, and OPEC imports. The EIA data sources are noted within the file. Keystone Piper made the percentage calculations, using the highest import year for each group as 100%.
