When it comes to gasoline, are Americans transforming from the world's chief gluttons to models of moderation? According to Philip Verleger, the energy economist, that is more or less the country's direction, with surprising consequences.

Verleger spells out this scenario in a note to clients, his version of the narrative of coming fossil-fuel abundance that we have heard elsewhere. Verleger's 11-page note is as oil-bullish as his most enthusiastic colleagues, who as a group say the U.S. is on the cusp of near energy independence. The oil-abundance narrative is a global one, and asserts flatly that peak oil theory is wrong.

Where Verleger diverges is in ascribing most of the responsibility for this U.S. oil boom not to more prolific oilfields, but to consumer efficiency. "[Gasoline] use will drop significantly by 2020 thanks to conservation, natural gas substitution and the ethanol mandate," Verleger told me in an email.

By 2022, 36 billion gallons of renewable fuels must be blended into gasoline, in line with a George W. Bush-era law. On top of that, President Obama has raised the bar for vehicular fuel efficiency to 54 miles per gallon, up from the current 30 miles a gallon. Plus long-haul truckers are making a shift to natural gas fuel, Reuters reports.

Read on

By the end of the decade, Israel will probably satisfy all its own natural gas requirements, and become a serious exporter of liquefied natural gas. Argentina might produce the world's third-largest volume of shale oil. Mozambique seems likely to become one of the largest LNG exporters in the world. And the United States may meet most of its own liquid-fuel needs.

Which is to say that the geopolitical fabric with which we have grown up seems to be unraveling in spots, and a new patchwork taking its place in Africa, the Middle East, North and South America, and beyond. Settled power and influence are giving way to a maelstrom of moving parts.

The backdrop is a global revival in the oil and gas business, ignited by energy companies that, after two decades of largely standing still, are finally drilling with purpose. These companies could yet self-destruct if they are not environmentally watchful. Clean-tech could achieve massive advances and economies of scale. But as of now, the colossal hydrocarbons industry -- long the tipping point, and at times the singular force, behind countries becoming rich, or falling behind -- is serving as the weaver of the new geopolitical fabric.

What could geopolitics look like? It is premature to detect concrete shapes, as Citigroup's Ed Morse wrote in a much-read recent note to clients. Yet we can discern outlines of the potential appearance of the new world.

We already know, for example, that the heft of the U.S. shale gas boom has challenged Russia's natural gas grip on Europe. Saudi Arabia also fears shale gas, whose abundance could ultimately contribute to the erosion of U.S. oil demand, as Chris Weafer said last week on this blog (also see remarks below by oil scholar Philip Verleger.).

Saudi has valid reasons to worry, as it seems almost-certain that the fresh big oil finds on other continents will whittle away at the centrality of the mighty nations of OPEC, the bain of Western economies for 35 years. OPEC seems far less likely to call the shots in global oil and, according to Citigroup and other analysts, the per-barrel price its members earn could be much-reduced. The wild card will be demand, meaning China's future oil appetite, and the continued progress of energy efficiency.

Similarly, Russia, the world's other current major oil-exporter, will probably be forced into serious political and economic reforms or face decline. Its government spending is too high, its non-hydrocarbon economy too anemic, and now its oil and gas sectors under challenge.

On the other side of the ledger, numerous heretofore basket-case nations up and down Africa's coasts will have to decide whether to squander their unexpected new petro-fortunes, or build middle classes and stable societies. In addition to Mozambique, that includes Tanzania, Kenya, Cameroon, Cote d'Ivorie, and more. Similar prosperity would be in the line of sight of numerous South American nations.

As for the United States (pictured above, drilling in Pennsylvania), a small but growing number of economists see the potential for a resurgent economy, built on the back of cheap natural gas. Leading the pack is Citigroup's Morse, who in the report cited above says the U.S. may more than halve its budget deficit by 2020, and experience a radical economic "revitalization and reindustrialization."

Likewise, we have a dissection of a coming U.S. boom in the Financial Times from Philip Verleger, who ran the Office of Energy Policy in the Treasury Department during the Carter Administration, and is a fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics.

With all of this turbulence, is it an article of faith that China will rule the world in the second half of the century, as many presume? China still looks on track to have the largest economy, but the many moving parts -- including its challenging demography, as the Economist reports -- make its trajectory seem less certain.

I separately emailed Verleger asking his opinion of the bullish forecasts of shale oil that we are seeing from Morse and others -- what is the data backing up these predictions? Verleger had an answer, but was mostly interested in laying out a case for what he calls a "Kodak Moment" of marginalization for the U.S. oil industry. The email is provocative, and I reprint in full after the Jump.

Read on

If the largest consumer of oil on the planet abruptly does two things -- doubles its own liquids production and cuts its imports in half -- one might find a big chain-reaction in both macroeconomics and geopolitics. This is precisely what many of the country's top industry analysts suggest is happening in the United States -- that the country will soon account for almost all its own oil requirements, and be in the position of exporting some of it. Count me as a skeptic, but since so many serious analysts are not, it merits looking under the hood.

Yesterday I raised the potential for a U.S. political shakeout if the oil-abundant theorists are correct: If the U.S. truly does become effectively self-sufficient in oil, political support for clean-energy would be seriously undermined.

Today, the Obama Administration imposed super-strict standards on the emissions from coal-fired power plants, incentivizing the development of carbon-capture technology, as well as the use of natural gas. This demonstrates that aggressive public policy can keep the goals of the clean-tech edifice alive; but it cannot be taken as a template, since policy ebbs and flows, and any future Republican administration, for example, is unlikely to embrace the same philosophy.

What about the economic wrinkles of a shift to oil as a trigger of a new U.S. Industrial Revolution, as forecast by Citibank analyst Ed Morse? Low-price energy provides a big advantage to U.S. makers of chemicals and plastics, since the feedstock -- natural gas -- is so cheap. Yet would this edge flow up the line to high-end technologies, the foundation of the overall U.S. economic advantage?

I exchanged emails with Michael Klare, a professor at Hampshire College and the author of The Race for What's Left. Klare thinks that oil abundance could have a fundamental impact on the character of the United States. He said:

I see this as making the United States more like a Third World petro-state -- we will see increased economic benefits in some quarters and among certain specialized labor sectors. But we will become more like a basic commodity producer that must lower its environmental standards in order to boost production, and less like a modern high-tech country like Germany and Japan.

Read on

In 2005, Fu Chengyu, then-CEO of the state-controlled Chinese oil company CNOOC, wrote an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal, titled, Why is America Worried? Fu (pictured above) intended to reassure Americans that he meant no harm with a bid at the time to buy Unocal, the California-based oil company. But it did no good: Americans were in fact worried about allowing what they regarded as a strategic resource to fall into the hands of a rival country. Instead Chevron, with a lower bid, ended up with Unocal.

Today, Fu, now CEO of another Chinese oil giant called Sinopec, is back in the United States. He has been buying up minority stakes in large unconventional oil fields -- shale gas and shale oil -- through deals with companies like Chesapeake Energy and Devon Energy. The Wall Street Journal says the state-by-state total investment since 2010 between Sinopec and CNOOC has been $17 billion.

So should America again be fearful? The answer is no. Specifically, if the U.S. were presented today with a similar situation in which Sinopec, CNOOC or another big Chinese enterprise bid on a U.S. oil company, it ought to eagerly embrace it.

The reason is that, unlike with IT or other high-tech intellectual property, it is in the United States' strategic interest for China to possess its companies' cutting-edge oilfield technology, specifically how to develop shale gas and shale oil. China will keenly seize on that technology and apply it back home, with the result that pressure will be reduced on global oil prices. On shale gas, because a big find of indigenous gas is one of the only ways in which China will switch out of far dirtier coal in the production of electricity, it would be a strategic achievement if China became a first-rate fracker.

I spoke this morning with an oilman having specific interest in the subject -- John Imle, Unocal's former president. Imle said that a Chinese acquisition of a U.S. energy company -- say, Chesapeake, the second-largest gas player in the country -- would be "all upside" for the U.S. He said:

It's part of globalization and not an unhealthy part. It's positive for humanity because it results in energy supplies that are adequate so we don't have energy wars down the road. And it should provide lower-cost energy globally, which is important for the global economy. So I don't see any downside. It's all up. We want the Chinese to have plenty of gas.

Read on

Last summer, a galactic cluster of energy experts informed us that the U.S. economy was failing to reignite in part because the Obama Administration was barring sufficient oil drilling in the Gulf of Mexico. Just three months later, the same experts say the U.S. is awash in domestic oil, and perhaps on the verge of independence from foreign oil. Serious journalists in Europe and the U.S. are sold on this ostensible shift, with all the geopolitical ramifications.

But what has changed? Not the fundamental numbers -- drillers were not oil-poor in August, only to be swimming in hundreds of thousands of barrels more of crude today. Instead, one suspects that politics are partly responsible for both the old and the new conventional wisdoms.  As Rachel Leven writes at The Hill, 33 lobbying firms are swarming Washington alone to persuade decision- and opinion-makers on the critical importance -- or trifling unimportance -- of energy independence, in this case as represented by the question of whether to build a pipeline to Canada's oil sands.

In other words, folks with skin in the game are leading the innocent among us to conflate "the fortunes of the oil industry with those of the international system," Michael Levi suggests on his blog at the Council on Foreign Relations. Last summer, it suited industry consultants to assert that the sky was falling, while now it is best to give hope for the achievement of a four-decade-old vapidity -- that the U.S. is best off importing no oil. Is it also best for China to import no oil -- is it hostage to Middle East volatility?

Other new conventional wisdoms are being road-tested as well. For instance, for a long time Americans have been led to worry that China is going to eat their lunch when it comes to jobs and economic wealth. Now, a spate of high-profile pieces suggest that Chinese innovation actually is good for the declining West.

Read on