Before WW2 America was non-reliant on petrol/gas imports. So how many years did America exacerbate and deplete it's own oil supplies by giving Stalin and Churchill's armies free gasoline during the Great war that ultimately drove the US into importing it's own oil?

by [deleted]

How many years (roughly) while still recognizing the difference (upwards swing) in demand after the US soldiers returned home.

sok4ya

In the USSR, oil products 2.67 million tons.

Lend-lease not been charity - it was an example of a well thought out mutually beneficial cooperation. By the end of the war the Soviet Union returned the US to 1 million 70 thousand. Tonnes of petroleum products, paid for the bulk of the submissions received

true_new_troll

I don't understand your question entirely, especially since the second part seems to recognize that increasing demand played the key role in the United States' oil imports, and not the depletion of its domestic supply. If you'll take a quick look at this chart provided by the Energy Information Administration showing American production of oil by year, as well as this one showing American oil imports by year, and you may have your question answered.

As you can see from the charts, US production of oil more than doubled between 1939 and the entire period between 1960-1992 (and that the United States now produces as much oil as it ever did). It would seem, then, that your assumption that Lend-Lease oil exports depleted the domestic supply and forced the United States to begin importing oil is incorrect.

According to official numbers, the US sent 2,670,371 tons of petroleum products to Russia, some oil, some refined fuel, which would come out to 21,362,968 barrels of oil if it was all refined fuel (i.e., this would be the upper limit). If you look at the EIA numbers, the US was producing 3.8 million barrels a day at the start of Lend-Lease, and 4.7 million barrels a day by the end of Lend-Lease. Even using the lower number, this means that the total oil sent to the Soviet Union represented a total of 6 days of American oil production. This, obviously, had little effect on the total US oil supply (by the 1970s, the US was producing more than this much oil every 3 days).

What's really going on here is that the United States experienced a wartime economic boom that persisted into the postwar era. Energy demands increased, in part because car ownership became the norm among the middle-class in the United States (which helped to spawn the suburban sprawl that defines many locations to this day). For a time, oil production in the United States increased to meet increases in demand (though you can see from the charts that consumption still outpaced production even during that period), but once oil production peaked in 1970, the United States had to begin importing oil in mass to meet its ever increasing demand.

bettinafairchild

FYI: the "Great War" was World War I. The Second World War is not referred to as the Great War.