Kamala Harris Fact Check on Energy Production and Independence

Republican candidates often criticize Democrats for restricting the U.S. energy sector or blame them for high gas prices. But days before she became the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, Vice President Kamala Harris stole a page from the Republican playbook and boasted about U.S. energy production under Joe Biden’s presidency.

In a July 18 speech in Fayetteville, North Carolina, Harris said, “Today, America has record energy production, and we are energy independent.”

Harris is right about record energy production, but he is only partly right about energy independence. By some definitions the U.S. is energy independent, but by an important definition it is not.

Is the U.S. having record energy production today?

This part of Harris’ statement is accurate.

Total U.S. energy production — which includes everything from heating oil and gasoline to sources used to generate electricity, such as coal, natural gas and renewables — reached 102.82 trillion British thermal units in 2023, up more than 4% from the level in 2022, which was the previous record.

This reflects the recent growth in U.S. energy production, which boomed under the last two presidents, Donald Trump and Joe Biden. Experts attribute this to increased production of shale oil and gas, the growth of renewable energy sources such as solar and wind, and improvements in the energy efficiency of buildings and vehicles.

Some definitions of energy independence have been met

As for the second part of Harris’ statement, some definitions of “energy independence” were met — but not all.

One definition that has held true under both the Trump and Biden administrations is that the United States exports more energy than it imports.

The Energy Information Administration, a federal agency that tracks energy statistics, found that in 2019 — when Trump was president — the United States became a net exporter of energy for the first time since 1952.

The situation has remained the same since then, with the gap reaching a record high in 2023. This is the last full year for which statistics are available.

Another, narrower, indicator of energy independence is whether the U.S. is a net exporter of oil. In 2020, the U.S. became a net exporter of oil for the first time since at least 1949. That position has persisted into 2022, the latest year for which data is available.

The third form of energy independence occurs when domestic energy production exceeds domestic consumption. This was the case from 2019 to 2023.

When we asked Harris’ campaign to back up her claim, she pointed to these metrics and to a March 2024 report from financial services firm JPMorgan that used these statistics to support its conclusion that “the United States has achieved U.S. energy independence for the first time in 40 years.”

Other signs of energy independence have not been met

There is one important indicator that holds the U.S. back from total energy independence: Data for crude oil—which is used to produce the gasoline that many consumers prioritize—hasn’t followed the same pattern as energy overall.

Oil imports have exceeded exports in each of Trump’s four years as president and in Biden’s first three years in office. Oil and crude oil are two different things; the United States is a net exporter of crude oil, a finished product, but a net importer of crude oil, the raw material used to produce crude oil and petroleum products.

Experts say there is a reason for the imbalance in oil imports and exports. Although the U.S. theoretically produces enough oil to meet its needs, it cannot refine all the oil it produces.

The crude is graded by weight and “sweetness,” a measure of the oil’s sulfur content. Most crude produced in the U.S. is “light” and “sweet,” and while some U.S. refineries can process it, many can’t.

These refineries are built to process heavier, less sweet crude oil (also called heavy sour crude oil) from the Middle East and other foreign suppliers. It’s a holdover from previous decades, when the United States mostly imported its crude oil.

This incompatibility prevents the United States from simply using its own crude oil production to meet all domestic needs. Changing refinery structures to accommodate U.S.-produced crude oil would be expensive and take years.

This means that the U.S. exports a lot of its domestic crude oil to the international market. To compensate, the U.S. still has to import a significant amount of crude oil for domestic use.

Mark Finley, a research associate on energy and global petroleum at Rice University’s Center for Energy Studies, said a more appropriate term to describe the U.S.’s current position is “net self-sufficiency.”

“Being self-sufficient means you produce everything you need,” Finley said. “On a net basis, that’s been true for the U.S. in recent years. But being independent means that what happens in the world doesn’t matter to you. That’s absolutely false.”

For example, much of New England depends on imports of oil and natural gas from abroad because of the region’s lack of pipeline capacity and regulations governing domestic shipping, said Hugh Daigle, an assistant professor of petroleum and geosystems engineering at the University of Texas at Austin.

So even as the U.S. becomes more energy independent, its supplies are still vulnerable to international events, experts say. Harris’s claim ignores that reality.

“While the United States produces more energy than it consumes, it remains closely linked to and dependent on world events,” Finley said.

The last time we looked at the claim about energy independence in 2023, we rated it “Half-True.” However, in this fact-check of former Vice President Mike Pence, we also failed to address Harris’ claim about record-high energy production, which she was right about.

Our ruling

Harris said, “Today, America has record energy production and we are energy independent.”

Harris is right that overall energy production is at a record high, and he is right that the United States is energy independent by some definitions — it is a net exporter of energy, a net exporter of oil, and it produces more energy than it consumes.

However, the United States is not a net exporter of oil, which is the source of gasoline.

Many U.S. refineries can’t process the type of crude oil produced in the U.S., so serving the domestic market requires importing a different type of crude from abroad. This makes the U.S. and its economy dependent on developments abroad.

We rate the statement as mostly true.