U.S. News: Upshot of Domestic Oil Boom: Fewer Shocks
The latest spasm of violence in the Middle East has sent crude-oil prices climbing in recent weeks, a familiar action-reaction that frequently has proved to be a drag on economic growth.</br></br>Yet that dynamic figures to ease in coming months and years as U.S. dependence on Mideast oil is, by a variety of measures, at a generational nadir.</br></br>In the current flare-up of unrest, Islamist militants have swept across northern Iraq, threatening Baghdad and spurring fears that violence could disrupt the country's 2.7 million barrels a day in exports. Amid this, the U.S. crude-oil benchmark on the New York Mercantile Exchange has climbed to around $107 a barrel, the highest level since September.</br></br>The oil-price instability has been playing out broadly since late 2010, when a string of popular political revolutions across the Middle East drove up the price of crude to $113 a barrel from $85 over five months.</br></br>Much has changed since the so-called Arab Spring to alter the U.S. energy picture. Advanced technologies such as hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, have boosted U.S. crude-oil production by 47% since late 2010. Domestic U.S. oil production in October surpassed imports for the first time in nearly two decades, putting slack into the global oil market and making more crude available at lower prices to countries like China and India.