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In part two of The Drum's series on energy and oil, Barry Naughten looks at what the rise in non-conventional oil means for American power, the Middle East, and action on climate change.

The so-called 'non-conventional petroleum revolution' (NCPR) in the US, and potentially around the world, doubtless has implications for international relations and the fight against catastrophic climate change. However, such implications are commonly misunderstood and exaggerated.

For example, does the NCPR also have the potential to reverse America's long term 'decline', as claimed by The Spectator (UK), historian Niall Ferguson and others? Is the US set to regain an earlier role as the world's energy super-power? Will this energy revolution enable or encourage US military retrenchment from the obviously still unstable Middle East?

The truth is, these suggestions are probably overblown, and stem from a misunderstanding about America's 'dependence' on oil from the Middle East and over-blown concerns about its international 'energy security'.

Oil prices have trebled since 2003, despite the global recession tending to dampen demand. This, combined with technological progress including advances in hydraulic fracturing and directional drilling, has led to a large expansion in oil and gas production from high-cost sources of petroleum including shale gas, tar sands, coal seam gas (CSG), and deep sea drilling.

So far the most spectacular expansions have been in US shale gas and tightly held oil, but similar potential exists globally, notably in Australia (coal bed methane), in some EU member-states (shale gas in Poland), and in China, where vast potential is as yet largely unrealised.

But while this has obvious implications for US energy policy, America's 'dependence' on oil from the Middle East shouldn't be overstated. In fact, no such simple dependence has shaped US policy in that oil-rich region.

Since World War II, the US as the global superpower has pursued control over oil in the Middle East in large part to underpin and prolong its international power. But rather than encouraging the availability of that oil to world markets (including its own), the effect of this control has often (though not always) been to obstruct such a process.

In the US itself, the slogan of energy independence has little to do with foreign strategy and much more to do with domestic politics. Contradictorily, it has been used, largely by Republicans, to justify loose regulation and tax breaks for the US domestic oil extraction sector; and by Democrats (against the interest of oil producers and importers) to legitimate fuel efficiency policies to constrain the consumption of petrol used in transport.

In any event, the US has never been at risk of failing to access foreign oil (or its own) at the world price. Most of its imported oil is transferred by sea, and the US has ruled the waves throughout the period since the US became a net importer of oil just after WWII.

The US is not projected to reach oil independence (according to the US Department of Energy, 2012). Arithmetically, it may do so (if only temporarily) if gas is included and the US becomes a net gas exporter.

What the NCPR means for US power
The actuality and legitimacy of US relative power has on balance diminished over the past decade, largely because of its misadventures in the Middle East and South West Asia, in all cases with an oil and gas agenda somehow involved if not always central. These issues are still ongoing, and are unlikely to diminish as a result of its 'petroleum revolution'.

A key precondition of international power is economic strength relative to adversaries and allies. Estimates of financial benefit to the US economy from the NCPR (as distinct from oil companies benefiting from tax breaks and weak safety regulation) should be tempered by noting the high production costs of relative to the conventional oil of the Middle East. As well, notions of energy-intensive industries flooding back to the US may neglect the ephemeral nature of a glut in US natural gas, especially to the extent that the US ramps up exports of LNG to Asia and Europe, and world prices for gas once again consequently converge to significantly higher levels.

Availability of non-conventional oil from the US and elsewhere puts an upper limit to the international oil price at perhaps $80-100/barrel averaged over the next decade. This figure can be compared with upwards of $200/barrel bandied about, even officially, in 2007-08. In this sense, NCPR technology protects and advances the position of oil importing economies generally, not just the US.

Notwithstanding the NCPR, the Middle East remains by far the major global source of low cost oil resources and hence will continue to receive large transfers of financial surplus based on high-priced world markets, whereas US non-conventional oil supplies are available only at much greater extraction cost and therefore yield much less financial surplus per barrel.

Similarly, Russia, Iran and Central Asia continue to have the by far the highest reserves of gas, especially lower cost conventional gas.

What it means for the Middle East
The US has long and successfully discouraged oil exports from Iran and Iraq, two of the three best oil-endowed states of the Middle East. These two states each paid a terrible price when their leaderships defied the US. Iran lost its democracy for 25 years when its elected Prime Minister Mossadeq was deposed in a CIA/MI6 coup, after the country sought to assert property rights over its own oil in 1950-53. Since regaining its sovereignty from the US in 1979, Iran then suffered first the Iran-Iraq war 1980-88, prolonged by US policy, and has endured ever-tightening economic sanctions to this day.

For their part, since the Iran-Iraq war, the Iraqi people have suffered two devastating wars separated by harsh international economic sanctions from 1991-2003.

By taking both Iran and Iraq out of the picture as major oil suppliers since the 1980s, the US put a floor under international oil prices to the benefit of its own producers and as well as that of the remaining Middle East OPEC member-states (who have been careful not to defy US power since 1973). Downward pressure on oil prices from their current levels of $80-100/barrel would depress production of high cost non-conventional oil in the US and elsewhere.

Avoiding such downward pressure may be difficult if slow global GDP growth persists and Iraq's production of low cost oil expands as recently suggested by the IEA, from 3.4 to 8 million barrels a day by 2035. This Iraqi production would meet fully half of the required increase in global oil supply projected over that period.

That said, the central questions for the US in the Middle East are largely unaffected by its non-conventional petroleum revolution. As the Brookings scholar Bruce Riedel has recently reminded us, these notably include avoiding an unnecessary and dangerously uncertain war with Iran. Not least, by destabilising oil markets, such a war could seriously impact on an unstable world economy.

As usefully spelt out by Stephen Kinzer, there are many potential benefits for the US from a rapprochement with Iran. Not least of these would be scope to refocus and retrench from its 'imperial over-overstretch' in the Middle East and South West Asia, at a time of ongoing domestic fiscal crisis and fatigue about costly and ineffectual wars in the region. So far, these mutual gains have been elusive.

This is in large part due to an effective veto from Israel and its US domestic political supporters rather than rational calculations of US national interest and Middle East regional security.

What it means for China
As a high per capita oil consumer, rapidly motorising China is currently following the 'American model' of low tax rates on oil consumption rather than the 'European' model of high oil taxes and hence much lower per capita consumption. However, there is little sign that China is prepared to grasp this political nettle in the way that it did with its 'one child' population policy. Thus, at considerable ecological and security cost, China continues to 'go out' in search of both foreign oil and in contested terrains such as the South China Sea.

Hence, the US may not be able to reduce its involvement in the international politics of oil even if it were to 'pivot' its political preoccupations from the Middle East to the China-Pacific region.

What it means for climate change
As one of the very few OECD member-states failing to ratify the Kyoto Protocol, there would be no more effective way for the US to retrieve some of its lost international prestige than to provide serious leadership in combating catastrophic climate change.

Such leadership would require far more than stabilising its emissions at mid-1990s levels by 2035 as is currently forecast (partly as a consequence of the shale gas revolution). The International Energy Agency's (IEA) demanding objective is an upper limit of 450 ppm CO2 equivalent by 2050. This would limit global temperature rise to 2 degrees Celsius by 2100 rather than the horrific 5-6 degrees increase associated with 'business as usual'. As with other OECD states, to achieve the 450 ppm objective requires not merely the backing out of coal but the large scale deployment of the zero-emissions technologies.

Short of adequately pricing emissions (for now politically difficult in the US), it can still promote this objective by continuing to shift out of coal-fired electricity generation, by regulating its non-conventional gas industry to obviate 'fugitive' methane emissions, by rejecting oil imports from CO2-intensive Canadian tar sands, by promoting by R&D, and by reducing its per capita consumption of oil-based transport fuels.

Normalising and effectively managing its international relations, notably with Israel, Iran and China, is equally important. Not least, such a normalisation would also support the climate change objective. Thus, in the case of Iran, its export of gas (currently precluded by US economic sanctions) can address alarming growth in Chinese and Indian coal-fired electricity. In the case of inducing much greater climate abatement action by China, now the largest energy user and CO2 emitter globally, the obvious missing policy link is climate leadership from the US where such emissions are much larger than China's in per capita terms.