$30 Oil Is Changing the World and Washington

by Timothy Cama, Julian Hattem and Devin Henry (The Hill) ... The oil industry and its supporters in Congress still have a long wish list. The federal ethanol blending mandate continues to anger oil refiners, and producers would like to tap into stores of oil offshore. The industry is also watching a pipeline safety bill and bracing itself for new federal rules on methane emissions at hydraulic fracturing sites and offshore drilling rigs.

But as long as the voting public has cheap gasoline, there’s little political incentive for a big fight.

“People are not desperately concerned about where our oil supply is going to come from, even though history has shown that those cycles are temporary and we’ll come out of them,” said Sarah Ladislaw, who directs the energy and security program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Before this election cycle, American voters had gotten used to a nearly constant stream of accusations, proposals and promises to lower gas prices, make the country energy independent and stop getting oil from unfriendly countries.

Now, apart from GOP front-runner Donald Trump’s call to “take the oil” in a bid to wipe out the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS), the topic rarely comes up.

But low prices won’t last forever. The U.S. Energy Information Administration predicts a slow, steady increase in prices as demand grows and some oil companies go under.

The agency’s latest forecasts, released in March, predicted $45 per barrel of oil by the end of 2017. The most recent long-term outlook, from a year ago, predicted an average price of $76 in 2018 — assuming no major political upheavals. READ MORE