U.S. nears ‘energy independence’ Trump promised during 2016 campaign

The U.S. hasn't achieved the "complete American energy independence" that President Donald Trump promised on the campaign trail in 2016, but the country is moving toward it.

"Under my presidency, we will accomplish a complete American energy independence," Trump, then a candidate for president, said during a May 2016 speech. "Complete. Complete."

Trump has since tried to declare victory on that promise, claiming prematurely that the U.S. had become "very energy independent" as of September 2019. We rated that claim Half True.

The bottom line now is the same as it was then: The U.S isn't energy independent yet.

One definition of energy independence says it occurs when domestic production outpaces domestic consumption. For the U.S., the gap between production and consumption has been narrowing for some time, and the two figures have been running neck and neck.

Some experts prefer another sense of the phrase, which defines energy independence as total disengagement from the global energy market, or zero imports. By that definition, the U.S. is even farther from achieving energy independence. 

In the first two months of 2020, the U.S. used more energy than it produced, according to the Energy Department's Energy Information Administration. 

That flipped in March, when the U.S. consumed roughly 7.8 quadrillion British thermal units of energy and produced roughly 8.5 quadrillion Btu. (A Btu is the amount of heat required to increase the temperature of a pound of water by 1 degree Fahrenheit.)

In February, the country consumed about 8.3 quadrillion Btu and produced about 8.1 quadrillion Btu. The U.S. consumed about 9 quadrillion Btu and produced 8.8 quadrillion Btu in January.

In 2019, as was the case in March, the U.S. produced slightly more energy than it consumed. Specifically, Americans used about 100.2 quadrillion Btu of energy and produced about 101 quadrillion Btu. Broken down by month, there were seven months in 2019 where energy production outpaced energy consumption.

That was a change from 2018, when the U.S. consumed about 5.5 quadrillion Btu more than it produced, and only two months saw production exceed consumption.

A large, rising share of the energy the U.S. produces comes from fossil fuels. In 2019, 80.1% of its energy production came from fossil fuels. That was followed by renewable energy at 11.5% and nuclear electric power at 8.4%.

In 2017, 2018 and 2019, fossil fuels' share of U.S. energy production was 77.7%, 79.1% and 80.1%, respectively.

Severin Borenstein, the faculty director of the Energy Institute at the University of California, Berkeley's business school, said in an email that producing more energy than it consumes doesn't make the U.S. "energy independent in any economic sense."

"The price of oil and gasoline in the United States is driven by the world oil market, and that continues to be true even as we produce a larger and larger share of the oil we consume," he said.

2019 also saw the U.S. export more energy than it imported, by a difference of about 715 trillion Btu, according to the EIA. That trend continued in the first three months of 2020.

Previously, the U.S. had been a net energy importer since 1953. But the EIA projected in January that the U.S. would remain a net energy exporter in 2020 and through 2050.

"The U.S. has become a smaller and smaller net importer of energy over the last decade and that trend has continued under Trump," Borenstein said, adding that Trump has opened more land to oil and gas production, but that hydraulic fracturing has largely driven the trend.

It's unclear how much the coronavirus pandemic, which has contributed to dropping oil prices, will affect these trends. 

"The crash of the oil market made much of U.S. production uneconomic, much more so than production from the Middle East, which is much lower-cost," Borenstein said. "But those are probably short-run trends."

When we last updated this promise, experts said it would neither be viable nor desirable for the U.S. to meet the other definition of energy independence and cut off all imports. The U.S. remains plugged into the global energy market.

Overall, the U.S. is close to regularly producing more energy than it consumes and exporting more energy than it imports. But it hasn't settled into complete energy independence in that way yet. The higher consumption in January and February is a case in point.

We rate this promise a Compromise.