A Note To The Granddaughters: "The Bakken Experiment"; US Oil Imports Have Fallen To Lowest Level In More Than 20 Years

HoustonBizJournal is reporting:

Increased domestic growth in oil and gas production has led to the lowest level of net energy imports in more than 20 years, the Energy Information Administration said in a  new report.

Overall, net imports of petroleum and natural gas dropped 19 percent from 2012 to 2013.
“Crude oil production grew 15 percent, about the same pace as in 2012, which led imports of crude oil to decrease by 12 percent, accounting for much of the overall decline in imports,” the EIA reports.

Meanwhile, U.S. energy consumption increased 2.4 percent after declining in 2011 and 2012. Renewable energy provided the largest percentage increase.

The graph at the link goes back to 1950.  I was born in 1951.

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Over the years I've opined that the gap between the "haves" and the "have-nots" in the US continues to widen.

While riding my bike this morning past the elementary school - middle school - high school complex where my granddaughters attend school, I had another thought (yes, I know: I need to get a life). As with individuals in the US, that gap between the "haves" and the "have-nots" also exists among nations. Having just read the article on the South African 200-wagon coal train (the Shongololo), I wondered if the top three impediments to national prosperity might not be: a) conflict; b) government fraud; and, c) operating under the wrong economic theory. I'm not sure if I would add "democracy" to that short list or not. It depends.

It goes without saying that conflict sets a developing country back years, if not decades. There might be one exception in today's modern world: Israel. Israel has somehow turned "conflict" into fortune. It's not an easy trick, but somehow Israel has done it. For them, "success from conflict" has become an art form.

Russia's economic success may have been permanently damaged by operating under the wrong economic theory for 70 years, from approximately 1917 to 1987, a time during which the western world was leap-frogging the rest of the world, only temporarily slowed by two world wars. Of course, Cuba continues to operate under the wrong economic theory. Some South American countries are at risk (e.g., Venezuela).

Government fraud setting back a country's prosperity: too many examples to even begin to list.

In my investing lifetime it seems there were only two lengthy periods when the US failed to live up to its potential: the lost decade (2000 - 2008) to be followed by another lost near-decade (2009 - 2016). Those two periods were lost due to different causes, and the outcomes, though the same, were also due to different reasons.

Fortunately, the US will not be set back significantly due to these two lost decades. From Sylvia Nasar's Grand Pursuit, pp 189 - 190:

So the question was not just what process could increase productive power by multiples in the course of two or three generations, but why the processes operated so much faster in some countries than others.

The traditional answer would have been that a nation's development depended on its resources. Schumpeter took the opposite view. What mattered was not what a nation had, but what it did with what it had. He identified three local elements of "industrial and commercial life" that drove the process: innovation, entrepreneurs, and credit. The distinctive feature of capitalism, he believed, was "incessant innovation," the famous "perennial gale of creative destruction." Marx too had observed that "the bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production" but he had had min mind primarily factory automation. Schumpeter took a broader view.

"Innovation," by which he meant the profitable application of new ideas rather than invention per se, could involve many types of change, he pointed out: a new product, production process, supply source, market, or type of organization.

Marshall, whose motto was that nature took no leaps, had stressed continual incremental improvements by managers, and skilled workers that accumulated over time. Schmpeter stressed innovative leaps that were dramatic, disruptive, and discontinuous.

When I read that passage, I immediately thought of what I call "the Bakken experiment."