Some sources state that the United States experienced the first post-World War II petroleum shortages starting in summer 1972, continuing into winter 1972/1973.
This photograph was apparently taken in Rhode Island in June 1972 (not 1973):
There is also a
report on hearings before the Joint Economic Committee of Congress on the Gasoline and Fuel Oil Shortage that were held in May and June 1973, covering shortages that started the previous year. Herbert Humphrey presided over the meeting and in his opening statement he mentions that gasoline supplies East of the Rocky Mountains are 2% below demand, with the shortfall expected to reach 5% of demand by 1975, after which new capacity would help to alleviate the shortage.
In the report Humphrey states that:
Partly because of the crash effort to refine gasoline last summer, we ran short of oil to heat our schools and factories in many parts of the country last winter, particularly in Minnesota, and our hopes for a good grain crop next fall are now riding on emergency measures to keep farmers and truckers supplied with diesel fuel. We were saved from a catastrophe in the Midwest— Wisconsin, Iowa, and Minnesota—and in other parts of the country, by the forces of nature and divine providence. We had one of the mildest winters in the past 25 years, and had it not been for the unusually warm weather, we would have had to close schools and factories, we would have had to shut down railroads, and we would have had to limit our use of electrical power. In fact, we were in an emergency situation declared by the Governor of our State in the first week of January.
The electricity shortages mentioned are due to the extensive use of petroleum for power generation at the time in the United States. Following passage of the 1963 Clean Air Act and its heavy restrictions on coal (
flue gas desulfurization wasn't commercialized at the time), petroleum and atomic power production surged. In fact, by the time of the 1973 Energy Crisis the United States was generating almost 15% of its electricity from petroleum and consuming
almost a million barrels per day to do so.
Numerous small refineries of 30,000 barrels per day capacity and smaller were built in the United States to help alleviate the refining shortage. However, these small refineries and some older ones suffered from reduced efficiency, although they were profitable. If not for the Energy Crisis, the United States would have been importing hundreds of thousands of barrels of refined petroleum products by the late 1970s, in addition to millions of barrels of crude petroleum.
The price controls of the 1970s are blamed for some of the slowdown in crude and refined petroleum production in the United States. The domestic United States market just wasn't as profitable as it used to be, and there was the opportunity for more profits overseas. Many of the major American petroleum companies were seeing increasing growth in the European and Japanese markets. However, even foreign refineries were operating close to capacity, and there was very little reserve capacity going into the 1970s.
If not for the crude petroleum embargoes, it is likely that there would eventually have been shortages of refined products. The embargoes helped alleviate the refinery shortages somewhat by reducing demand for a period, but the shortage of crude petroleum in the United States market was probably not as severe as it might otherwise have been due to the shortage of refining capacity anyways.
What would the implications have been for the economics, culture, and energy policy of the 1970s and beyond if the crisis had essentially been self-imposed due to price controls and other policy failures?