Imagine, being in Beaumont, TX one hundred and sixteen years ago, at 10:30 in the morning. You would have been able to see something "ground breaking". Yeah, pun intended, because it was on this day, 116 years ago, that the US struck oil. It was a 100-foot drilling derrick named Spindletop that struck black gold.

This got me thinking about where the US gets it's oil from. Because most everyone immediately says the Middle East. While we do get some from the Middle East, it's not as much as most people think. According to this article at NPR.org we only get 12.9% of our oil from the Middle East/Persian Gulf.

We get the most from, well, ourselves, with 38.8% of oil coming from here in the United States. We get 19.6% from Latin America, which includes Mexico and Venezuela. Then comes Canada, supplying us with 15.1% of our oil. So that means the Middle East comes in fourth, in the amount of oil we get from that region.

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