California and the West Coast Versus US Oil Independence
The West Coast and other states to the west of the Rocky Mountains are largely insulated from the rest of the United States, except for rail lines and one southern pipeline from Texas. Most of our oil is either self-produced, or imported from Pacific Ocean sources or Canada. For us, energy security means no more offshore drilling. A vast part of California is within a day’s outing at the beach. Our richest areas are along the coast. Ruining a coastal environment or even raising threats of that has real consequences in real estate evaluations. We will examine the oil sources for California in detail below.
For the overview of crude oil supply sources to California refineries in 2016 was 602.9 million barrels, down from 655 million a decade ago. Of that, 205.6 million barrels or 34.1% was from California, 68.7 million or 11.4% was from Alaska, and 328.5 million or 54.5% was from foreign sources.
For the United States, its gross petroleum imports in 2016 were 10.06 million barrels per day, and with 5.19 million barrels per day in exports, the net imports were 4.87 million barrels per day. Per year, these amounts were gross imports of 3,672 million barrels, with 1,894 million barrels in exports, and net imports of 1,778 million barrels.
California’s imports from foreign sources were 8.95% of the US gross petroleum imports in 2016.
The top five countries for US imports were Canada (38%), Saudi Arabia (11%), Venezuela (8%), Mexico (7%), and Colombia (5%). Trump’s argument that America’s imports are politically vulnerable looks rather suspicious, since Venezuela is the only one with instability. The sum of these top five is 69%. Since Trump just okayed the Keystone pipeline to Canada, and Mexico sure look solid, and Trump just committed to backing Saudi Arabia with a $110 billion arms deal (already in the works) and an overall $350 billion in economic investments, they look solid.
The real goal of “Energy Dominance” is of course to enhance Trump’s perception of power, and to allow oil companies to drill offshore, and on federal lands, with a minimum of needed protective regulations. US net oil imports have actually been dropping since 2005, when they were 12.55 million barrels per day, and are now down to 4.87 million, or 39% of their all-time high. Looks like we were on an “energy dominance” path throughout the Obama administrations.
Here are the top five foreign imported oil sources for California in 2016, out of the total of 316.8 million barrels imported:
Saudi Arabia 108.4 34.2%
Ecuador 74.1 23.4%
Columbia 45.7 14.4%
Kuwait 27.9 8.8%
Iraq 14.1 4.4%
These add up to 85.2%.
