“WE’RE USING 20%, WE HAVE 2%”
OBAMA SAID:
“America uses more than 20 percent of the world’s oil. If we drilled every square inch of this country — so we went to your house and we went to the National Mall and we put up those rigs everywhere — we’d still have only 2 percent of the world’s known oil reserves. Let’s say we miss something — maybe it’s 3 percent instead of 2. We’re using 20; we have 2.” (March 15, 2012, Prince George’s Community College.)
TRUE:
The President derives his “2 percent” from America’s “proven reserves,” about 20 billion barrels of oil. Proven reserves are the “quantity of energy sources estimated with reasonable certainty, from the analysis of geologic and engineering data, to be recoverable from well-established or known reservoirs with the existing equipment and under the existing operating conditions.”
The U.S. was said to have 30 billion barrels of “proven reserves” in 1980. Yet from 1980 to 2008, we produced about 75 billion barrels of oil.
No one thinks the proven reserves numbers come anywhere close to capturing our oil resources–even the U.S. government. The Energy Department estimated in 2006 that there were about 400 billion barrels of technically recoverable oil, including undiscovered resources and that does not even include oil shale. That’s 5 times the number President Obama is using. And oil shale is another 800 billion to 1 trillion barrels.
Total estimated resources exceed 1.4 trillion barrels of oil in the United States, and Goldman Sachs predicted last year that the U.S. has the potential to be the world’s largest oil-producing country by 2017. The number the President is using, about 20 billion barrels, is less than the current best estimate for the Bakken formation in North Dakota alone.
In addition, the President’s claim that “we use 20% of the world’s oil” is false and evasive. We consume 20% of the world’s oil production, not 20% of the world’s oil reserves as the President’s comparison suggests. The President is just cherry-picking numbers. The 2 and the 20 are not meaningfully related so the comparison makes no sense—it certainly doesn’t prove we’re consuming too much or that there is too little to go around.
