In case you haven't heard, the United States has the potential to pump out a lot of oil in the near term. But what about the long term? Well, the country's production grew faster in 2012 than in any previous year in the history of American oil. That's a good sign. And for the last week of May, production actually topped imports -- the first time that has happened since January 1997. That's another good sign.
The best sign came from the Energy Information Administration earlier this month, which projects that Uncle Sam could crank out up to 10.2 billion barrels of oil per day (mbopd) and 18 mbopd of combined petroleum liquids in a best-case, high-resource scenario. That's quite a remarkable turnaround from the turn of the century, although it's important to remember that it's a long-term projection -- meaning it has the highest likelihood of being wrong. Nonetheless, Fool contributor Maxx Chatsko breaks it all down for investors in the following video.
