EIA Projects U.S. as Net Energy Exporter
The U.S. Energy Information Agency (EIA) recently released its Annual Energy Outlook 2017 and envisages the country will become a net energy exporter this year.
“The EIA’s projections show how advances in technology are driving oil and natural gas production, renewables penetration, and demand-side efficiencies, and reshaping the energy future,” says Adam Sieminski, the EIA’s administrator. “The variation across the analysis cases of projected net energy export levels – as well as other findings – demonstrates the importance of considering the full set of scenarios, based on low and high economic growth, low and high oil price, low and high oil and gas resources, and new technology developments.”
The U.S. becomes a net energy exporter in 2017 in most of these situations, as petroleum liquid imports fall and natural gas exports rise. Exports are highest, and grow from 2017-2050 throughout this 33-year period. This includes the high and low resource and technology cases, as favourable geology and technological developments combine to produce oil and gas at lower prices.
The high oil case provides the most promising economic conditions for producers while restraining domestic consumption, enabling the most rapid transition to net exporter status. In all cases, but the high oil and gas resource technology one, which assumes substantial improvements in production technology and more advantageous resource availability, U.S. production declines in the 2030s, which slows or reverses project growth in net energy exports.
Interesting Key Findings
Economic consumption is consistent across all cases, bounded by the high and low economic growth cases. In the reference situation, total energy consumption increased five per cent between 2016 and 2040. As a significant portion of energy consumption is related to economic activity, energy consumption is project to increase by approximately 11 per cent in the high economic growth case, during 2016-2040, and remain nearly flat in the low economic growth case. In all these situations, the electric power sector was presumed to continue as the largest consumer of primary energy.
Energy production rages from nearly flat in the low oil and gas resource and technology instance, to nearly 50% growth during 2016-2040 in the high resource and technology case. Unlike energy consumption, which varies less across the various scenarios, projections of energy production vary widely. Production growth is dependent on technology, resource, and market conditions. Total energy production increases by more than 20% in the reference case, from 2016 through 2040, led by increases in crude oil and natural gas production.
Energy related carbon dioxide emissions decline in most of the situations, with the highest emissions projected in the no clean power plan case. All of the scenarios, except this one include the clean power plan.
“To better focus EIA’s resources on expanding its understanding of the rapidly evolving energy markets, as well as to better represent new information in our models,” Sieminski reports, “we adopted a two-year release cycle for these publications for the Annual Energy Outlook. A full edition of the AEO, including in-depth updates on changes in legislation and regulations, and a large set of side cases with browser tables and spreadsheets for all cases is produced every second year. “
In years between the full editions, a shorter edition provides a smaller number of cases summarized in annotated presentation slides, with the standard set of AEO browser tables and spreadsheets containing the detailed modeling results.
By law, the EIA’s data, analysis and forecasts are independent of approval by any other officer or employee of the United States government, keeping its views independent of those represented by the U.S. Department of Energy or any other federal agency.
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