US daily crude supply could surge to 10M barrels by 2040

Domestic oil production could reach more than 10 million barrels per day by 2040, with nearly half of these supplies coming from unconventional plays, according to a government report. The Energy Information Administration has projected that a dramatic increase in production from unconventional plays like tight oil (the hard-to-reach crude trapped in shale rock and other dense formations) and some increased Alaskan Arctic drilling could increase the amount of oil produced domestically by more than 40 percent by 2040. The United States produced an average of 6.5 million barrels per day in 2012, according to the EIA. The projection is the most optimistic of a range of scenarios that the EIA has created to project future energy supply in the United States. It is significantly larger than the default scenario, which estimates roughly 6 million barrels a day of production by 2040...more