Luckily, 10 years from now oil will no longer mainly be flowing from the Middle East to the United States, Europe, and Asia. Due to technological developments and new discoveries, new sources of oil are being explored in new areas of the world, making democracies much less dependent on oil flowing from countries like Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq, or Venezuela.

A lot of new oil deposits have been found in the Western hemisphere. Indeed, in the exploration cycle of oil it takes around 10 years to find, pump, refine, and transport new oil to your local gas station. However, major technological break­throughs have been made, unavailable 10 years ago, and large pockets of new oil supplies are being made available from Alberta in Canada, North Dakota and South Texas in the United States, and Brazil.

The oil production from tar sands in Canada stands at about 1.5 million barrels today and this is already a bigger production than Libya’s output when Gadaffi was still in power. I expect that Canada’s oil production will be ramped up to 3 million barrels around 2020. By then Canada will become the fifth largest oil producer in the world after Russia, Saudi Arabia, the United States, and China. Of course, there are great environmental concerns. On average, carbon dioxide output from gasoline produced from oil sands is about 15% higher then conventional fossil fuel oil. However, oil sands do contribute greatly to energy reliability and security. More then 50% of Canada’s oil exports come from tar sands and this percentage will only increase in the years ahead.

In the United States, new shale gas techniques and horizontal drilling have been developed to explore new deposits in North Dakota and Southern Texas. It is now possible to extract oil from non-porous dense rock formations. Without these new extracting and drilling techniques oil would not flow. North Dakota is already producing 500 000 barrels a day. I expect that by 2020 the United States will also produce a total of around 3 million new barrels of oil a day.

In 2005, Brazil discovered huge offshore oil deposits below a layer of salt, which is around 2.5 km thick. The state-owned oil company Petrobras had the technology to “look” through the salt belt and discovered these new deposits. Progress to pump oil from these deep-sea pockets is on track and Brazil expects to produce around 5 million barrels a day by 2020. This is twice Venezuela’s output and also more than the present oil production in Saudi Arabia. Thus, next to sugar and soybeans, Brazil will become a powerhouse in oil as well.

This is a real paradigm shift, which can add a substantial new oil production of 11 million new barrels a day by 2020 in the Western hemisphere. So the new oil will flow more North to South and South to North, instead of East to West.

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