President Donald Trump is taking his ‘America First’ energy plan from the campaign trail to the White House website, vowing to achieve energy independence from OPEC and any nations hostile to U.S. interests. Trump is not the first U.S. President to have promised energy independence. At the height of the 1973 Arab oil embargo, Richard Nixon suggested a project to ensure that by the end of the 1970s, “Americans will not have to rely on any source of energy beyond our own”. More than 40 years later, America continues to rely on foreign oil imports, and is a large importer and even larger consumer of crude oil. This makes the U.S. crude oil flows an integral part of the global oil market. The U.S also continues to import oil from OPEC producers, and even if volumes have been consistently below 4 million bpd since September 2012, imports in October […]