Shale oil can’t take all the credit for America’s rise to energy superpower, according to Bloomberg. Rigs in the green-blue waters of the US Gulf of Mexico pumped over 1.85mn bpd of crude in July, the largest volume in nearly 4 decades, according to government data. That helped push the nationwide oil supply to a record-high of 11mn barrels a day during the month
The startup of new wells and the return of some platforms from maintenance contributed to the output rise in the Gulf of Mexico, according to Danya Murali, a mathematical statistician for the EIA’s Office of Petroleum, Natural Gas, and Biofuels Analysis. “It was one platform down after another in the Gulf for the last several months,” she said in an e-mail, adding that these have all since resumed service. Offshore gulf production rose 11% in July. By contrast, output from Texas, the largest driver of shale production, rose 1% to reach a fresh record of 4.469mn bpd.
