President Donald Trump likes to say the United States has more oil and gas — or as he calls it, “liquid gold” — than “any country in the world.”
Problem is, it doesn’t.
While the United States is producing more oil than any country ever, and has been at the top since 2018, America’s petroleum gold rush is tapping reserves far smaller than those of several other heavy hitters in the world of petroleum.
The U.S. ranks ninth in “proved reserves” of oil, according to the Energy Institute’s latest Statistical Review of World Energy. “Proved reserves” are what researchers believe can be extracted from known reservoirs under existing economic and geological conditions. Or, as Trump puts it, the oil “under our feet.”
Venezuela has the world’s largest proved oil reserves with nearly 304 billion barrels. Production there, however, has plummeted amid economic collapse — and the U.S. has told Chevron to wind down operations in the country. Saudi Arabia and Venezuela each have more than four times the U.S. store of nearly 69 billion barrels.
The U.S. is fifth in proved reserves of natural gas. Russia has the largest gas reserves at more than 1,300 trillion cubic feet, nearly three times the proved reserves of the United States. The U.S. does have much larger coal reserves than any other country at nearly 250 billion metric tons of proved reserves. China, though, is the largest producer.
The quality of America’s oil reserves, meanwhile, is starting to decline. The U.S. is decades away from running out of oil, even if new technologies don’t open vast new stores. But it’s getting more expensive to get domestic oil out of the ground. Some experts see U.S. production starting to level off in the coming years and then start to decline by the early 2030s.
For many, Trump’s falsehoods are simply the noise to contend with while finding the signal. Kevin Book, a managing director at consulting firm ClearView Energy Partners, noted that Trump also correctly points to the country’s top producer status. It’s a part of Trump’s call for “energy dominance,” Book said.
“It has been intended to argue that we don’t need resources from other countries,” Book said. “Actually, energy trade, particularly in hydrocarbon fuels, is global, and there are strong trade relationships we rely on.”
But he added that production is more important than reserves in politics because reserves are about the long term.
“And in politics,” Book said, “there is no long term.”
For Trump, the other point of repeating the bad information is to make people believe it, said Anthony Leiserowitz, director and founder of the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication. Leiserowitz said there’s a term for that: “message repetition.”
And it can lead people to believe inaccurate information to be actually true.
“Most Americans have no idea how much oil the US actually has and are unlikely to fact check the claim,” he said in an email exchange. “I suspect they believe it will help convince Americans of a narrative / argument that thus we will have ‘energy dominance’ if we just exploit our own fossil fuels, which will result in cheaper prices for energy and a stronger economy.”
The White House did not respond to a request for comment. But Trump has exaggerated U.S. oil stores repeatedly as he seeks to increase oil production. He rarely mentions that oil and gas production under former President Joe Biden set records.
In his Jan. 20 inaugural address, Trump said the U.S. has “the largest amount of oil and gas of any country on Earth — and we are going to use it.” In his March address to a joint session of Congress, he said, “we have more liquid gold under our feet than any nation on Earth and by far,” making clear he’s talking about reserves rather than production.
Speaking about the economy in Las Vegas shortly after his inauguration in January, Trump gave the impression that the United States has the most oil but produces less than other countries, which is false.
“We have more than Saudi Arabia. They’ve got a lot. We’ve got more,” he said. “We’ve got more than anybody. We just don’t use it because of the environment. These people are crazy.”
More recently, in an April 8 appearance in the Oval Office, Trump suggested that buying U.S. energy was a way that Europe might head off steep trade tariffs. He said “We have more of every kind of energy, every form of energy, from oil and gas to coal.”
Some other observers dismiss Trump’s liquid gold boasts as routine exaggerations from a president who has never formed a close alliance with facts. University of Houston energy fellow Ed Hirs compared Trump’s words to the boasting of Jerry Jones, owner of the Dallas Cowboys football team, which hasn’t gone to the Super Bowl since 1996.
“It’s just another Jerry Jones saying he’s got a Super Bowl championship team,” Hirs joked.
‘An economic issue’
American Petroleum Institute CEO Mike Sommers, in a February speech to the Economic Club of Pittsburgh, talked of a complacency about America’s status as an energy superpower. But he tied it back to the Biden administration.
Becoming the world’s biggest producer despite having smaller oil and gas reserves than other countries was a triumph of “American innovation,” Sommers said.
“But that success came with a downside. Leaders and policymakers got complacent,” he said. “Exploring and tapping new reserves? That was so last century. That was somebody else’s dirty work now. Not America’s.”
API, the U.S. oil and gas industry’s biggest trade group, didn’t respond to questions about whether Trump’s exaggeration could lead to complacency.
Some of the superlatives used by Trump and others are true. The United States is producing more crude oil than any country, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. The agency says the U.S. produced an average 13.2 million barrels per day in 2024, and it’s projecting that will go up to 13.5 million for this year.
The U.S. is by far the largest gas producer, averaging 113 billion cubic feet per day last year. It is exporting more liquefied natural gas than any other country, 11.9 bcf/d.
“You could even say we’re dominant,” Book said. “We are the dominant producer of oil and the dominant producer of natural gas.”
While it is a net exporter, producing more petroleum than it uses, the United States still imports millions of barrels of oil a day because many U.S. refineries can’t run solely on oil produced domestically.
“The real issue is, do we have oil that can match up with what our refineries require?” Hirs said. “The answer is no. It’s an economic issue.”
And, Hirs said, the U.S. has a vulnerability in the global oil market. It costs more to produce from U.S. shale plays than from conventional formations.
The United States largely exhausted its conventional reserves — the geological low-hanging fruit — years ago. That’s why the country’s largest oil companies shifted to foreign sources for decades. The domestic oil industry was revived about 15 years ago by advances in hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling to tap unconventional reserves, also known as shale.
Shale is what geologists call “source rock.” The oil and gas in conventional plays migrated from the source rock across hundreds of millions of years, said Stephen Sonnenberg, a petroleum geology professor at the Colorado School of Mines. There are resources left in the shales, but they’re usually harder to extract.
Other major petroleum countries also have shale source rock full of oil and gas, but they’ve been able to maintain their status as top producers without exhausting their easier-to-extract conventional supplies.
“In countries like Saudi Arabia, they have tremendous amounts of what we call conventional resources,” Sonnenberg said.
The U.S. industry’s position as the high-cost producer spells trouble for the domestic oil industry when prices start heading downward, Hirs said. That’s the direction they’ve been pointing lately.
The day after Trump was sworn in, the benchmark U.S. spot oil price closed at $76.79 per barrel. Oil futures settled Thursday at less than $63 a barrel in New York trading.
“We’re the high-cost producer in a commodity market,” Hirs said, adding, “That marginal barrel of oil is costing more to get out of the ground.”
This story also appears in Climatewire.
