U.S. oil production continues to expand as prices fall

U.S. oil production last year smashed though record levels and continues to surge upward, with the county becoming the world’s largest oil producer earlier this year.

Domestic oil exports have ballooned in the three years since they have been legal. The United States last week became anet petroleum exporter for the first time in 75 years.

Despite the more than 150-year-old industry’s record clip, the country’s oil reserves also are expanding. Proved reserves set a record level in 2017 and are continuing to grow, according to a pair of government reports released this week.

Oil is a finite, nonrenewable resource. We can’t make more. But improving technology and techniques have allowed the industry to more accurately locate and measure oil reserves and more efficiently recover and produce the oil.

Higher oil prices over the past year also have helped increase the amount of oil that is considered economically recoverable, although tumbling prices over the past month could erase some of that gain.

Proved U.S. oil reserves were 39.2 billion barrels as of the end of 2017, surpassing a 47-year record of 39.0 billion barrels, the U.S. Energy Information Administration said this week. The country’s oil industry added 6.4 billion barrels in 2017, up 19.5 percent on the year.

Production of crude oil and lease condensate also increased by 6 percent from year-end 2016 to 2017, the report stated.

The Wolfcamp/Bone Springs shale play in the Permian Basin in west Texas and southeast New Mexico exceeded North Dakota’s Bakken Shale to become the country’s largest oil-producing tight play.

Since 2017, the Permian — along with other U.S. basins — has continued to expand.

The U.S. Geological Survey this week said the Wolfcamp Shale and Bone Spring Formation of the Delaware Basin — which is the western portion of the Permian — has the largest unconventional oil and gas resource the agency has assessed.

The USGS study measures technically recoverable resources, which ignores commodity price and makes more assumptions than the proved reserves the EIA reports. Still, the USGS numbers show the basin contains 46.3 billion barrels of oil, 281 trillion cubic feet of natural gas and 20 billion barrels of natural gas liquids.

“Christmas came a few weeks early this year,” U.S. Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke said in a statement Thursday. “American strength flows from American energy, and as it turns out, we have a lot of American energy.”