A stunning new report from the International Energy Agency says U.S. shale production of oil and gas, led by the Eagle Ford and Permian Basin in Texas, will turn the United States into the world's leading oil exporter by 2025, News Radio 1200 WOAI reports.
The IEA says U.S. shale oil production is set to double, to 17 million barrels a day, in the coming seven years. Currently, total U.S. oil production from all sources is about 9 million barrels a day.
IEA Director Fatih Birol says the U.S. will see the fastest growth in oil production over the coming seven years in world history, surpassing Saudi Arabia's sharp ramp up of its oil production in the late 1960s and 1970s.
"In the next ten years, more than 80% of global oil production growth, comes from the United States only," he said.
This is an amazing reversal of fortune for the United States, which has been under the thumb of foreign oil producers for decades, and suffered through crippling embargos of oil in the 1970s. The U.S. is still not a net exporter of oil, but Birol says the increase in shale production is about to change that.
"There will be a lot of oil in the world markets, and that will put downward pressure on prices," he said.The IEA says the flood of U.S. shale oil will depress the introduction of alternative fuels. The agency says even with trendy electric cars being pushed by producers and governments, world oil demand, driven by lower prices, will reach 100 million barrels a day by 2025.
The report says, far from being crippled by OPEC's production increases in late 2014, which were designed to drive U.S. shale out of business, that strategy has backfired big time, turning U.S. shale into a 'leaner and hungrier version of its former self,' and able to produce at a profit at lower and lower world oil prices.
The down side of the shale boom will be that many of the jobs that the Eagle Ford created in 2012 an 2013 will not be coming back, as oil production has become remarkably automated. But IEA says the U.S. energy export boom will mean a 'lot of dollars for a lot of U.S. businesses.
Birol sees the same scenario for U.S. shale produced natural gas. Already becoming the world's dominant fuel for energy production, he says he U.S. will also the rule the world when it comes to gas imports.
"A big upheaval in the world oil and gas markets, driving by the shale boom in the United States," he said.
The IEA foresees the U.S. shale dominance continuing well into the 2030s, as it has upped the total amount of recoverable shale oil in known U.S. fields to more than 100 billion barrels.