The amount of oil America is importing has continued to climb, even before the effects of the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico may have been felt. According to the monthly report issued by T. Boone Pickens from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Energy Information Administration, the U.S. imported 61 percent of the oil we needed in May or 347 million barrels.
“Through the first five months of 2010,” Pickens said, “we have spent $50 billion more on foreign oil than we spent for the same period in 2009.”
Pickens said, “We’re importing more than 13 million barrels of oil per day, far ahead of the world’s next largest importer, China which imports about five million barrels a day.”
Pickens also repeated his warning
that China has “spent more than $200 billion in recent months securing all the oil they can get their hands on globally.”
“In the wake of the tragic Gulf Coast oil spill, we need to recognize that any U.S. oil reserves lost will inevitably increase our foreign oil dependency, further jeopardizing our national and economic security,” Pickens said.
In reporting our continued dependence on foreign oil, Pickens said that there is a “resource in this country, natural gas, that we can immediately use to replace oil which we now import as a transportation fuel. On an energy equivalent basis we have twice as much domestic natural gas as Saudi Arabia has oil.
“It’s clean, domestic, cheaper, and it’s an ideal transportation fuel that we need to put to work with a particular focus on heavy duty truck fleets.”
Currently there is bi-partisan legislation in both the U.S. House and Senate that would advance the use of natural gas. The NAT GAS Act (H.R. 1835 and S. 1408) and the American Power Act all contain language that would replace foreign oil/diesel/gasoline with cleaner, abundant, domestic natural gas for America’s heavy duty fleets.
— The Pickens Team