A Barron's story sent shares of oil and gas equipment company Schlumberger (SLB) higher Monday as the company focuses more of its efforts on the North American energy market. Meanwhile, the Energy Information Administration recently reported that U.S. crude oil production in July was the highest since April 1987. Greg Zuckerman, a reporter at The Wall Street Journal and author of The Frackers: The Outrageous Inside Story of the New Billionaire Wildcatters, sat down with us to talk about where we are in the U.S. "energy revolution."
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"What I find interesting is we’ve had a tremendous amount of production, and there have been skeptics out there saying it’s going to slow down at some point, and it’s only ramped up," Zuckerman tells us, noting that the U.S. now produces 8.5 million barrels of oil a day compared to 5 million barrels a day five years ago.
Business Insider points out that the U.S. shale boom exploded just as the domestic economy was at its lowest point in recent history. Charles Schwab's Liz Ann Sonders argues that we still need fracking's benefits for future growth and to maintain competitiveness in manufacturing worldwide.
Related: "A wonderful development": U.S. fracking offsets global turmoil, keeping oil below $100
The political rhetoric around oil has traditionally emphasized reducing the nation's dependency on foreign oil, specifically the oil of countries the U.S. does not consider friends. With U.S. oil imports at 19-year lows, how far is the country from achieving independence?
Related: U.S. to allow crude exports for the first-time in four decades
"We're getting closer to what I call energy security, not necessarily energy independence," Zuckerman says, explaining that we’ll always be dependent on foreign oil. He says we're getting to the point where we may only rely on ("friends"and neighbors of the U.S. like) Canada and Mexico.
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