The United States will remain major oil importer till at least 2030, LUKoil Vice President Leonid Fedun said Tuesday.
"The United States will remain major oil importer in the foreseeable future that could be analyzed," Fedun told journalists.
He noted that the current oil price crisis was caused by the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries' attempt to stop the rapid development of the shale industry.
"If there were no price crisis, the United States would have produced about 10 million barrels of oil from shale formations in 2016. At the moment, they are producing slightly more than 4 [million barrels]," Fedun said.
The LUKoil vice president stressed that the future of the US shale industry wholly depended on dynamics of prices.
He added that to maintain shale oil production it was necessary to drill new wells, though the US drillers reached "huge progress" in extracting oil as they chose the best sites and drilled very fast. Besides, the price of the average well dropped to $6-6.5 million.
Nevertheless, "the number of these ideal sites is limited," so without significant growth in oil prices, there would be no increase in US oil production.
Fedun emphasized that even under the most optimistic scenario, US shale oil production would not exceed 7.5 million barrels in 2030, which would not be "sufficient to cover the US internal demand," therefore, the country would remain a major oil importer.