The Future of America and the American World Order

[Sigurd]

9. The Gulf: Americans once believed that their prosperity and way of life depended on having assured access to Persian Gulf oil. Today, that is no longer the case. The United States is once more an oil exporter. Available and accessible reserves of oil and natural gas in North America are far greater than was once believed. Yet the assumption that the Persian Gulf still qualifies as crucial to American national security persists in Washington. Why?

Being an oil exporter doesn't mean you don't import at all. That somehow only if there are surplus of oil, you will export. The fact that USA is still ranked as the top importer after China, importing oil worth around $110 billion in 2016 while exporting oil worth $8 billion tells us that USA still needs to "befriend" oil exporters. Since the Persian gulf accounts for 41% of the world production in more or less one place and you don't really want to spend all your dollars in one shop added to the fact that there are strained relationships between USA and other top exporters (Russia, Venezuela and Mexico to mention a few), It seems strategical to want to keep the taps running in the Persian gulf.
Add the complexity of oil prices into it, and you would want all exporters operating to keep prices low and stable. Some of the exporters are notorious for creating crises and is difficult to handle (African, South american and middle eastern oil exporters). If there are crises - you would want to be right there on top of it to ensure you get your needs secured. IMO that's why the Persian gulf and its major contributors to oil exports is a question of security interests. You don't want to go bankrupt over prices and the possible loss of internal consumption (whatever you use all the oil for).

However, a patron of this site, I think his name was jayrock, a colleague in the oil business and from Alaska, said that USA could be self reliant on oil IF they started extracting more of the larger oil-reservoirs buried under the Alaskan soil. But as he suspected, it was kept there for a rainy day, and it would spell catastrophic for the environment (then.. about 2003. Maybe you wait for the new technology to minimize the environmental impact). And it would take years maybe decades from the get-go before your yearly $110 billion consumption is filled with internal oil. In the mean time - there would be oil crises.