More and more, the U.S. has been seen inching toward energy independence in the past few years. In the lone desolate expanse of the Permian Basin, located in West Texas, the sounds of oil rigs and the stench of fumes indicate the increase in American production of oil and natural gas.

Every week, the industry is extracting a million barrels or more of oil from the “deepest waters of the Gulf of Mexico to the prairies in North Dakota,” using new technology and spurred on by public outrage of rising oil prices.

Over the past couple of years, since the mid-2000s, the American industry for oil and natural gas has been vastly increasing production, backtracking the past twenty years of decline. Ironically, Americans as a whole are pumping less gasoline, most likely in part because the recession but also because of fuel-efficient vehicles.

All this added together paints an unexpected picture for the United States: achieving independence from foreign energy sources; something that would change American foreign policy, the economy and so much more. In 2011, the US imported 45% of the oil it used, a dramatic difference from the record high 60% in 2005.

''For decades, consumption rose, production fell and imports increased, and now every one of those trends is going the other way,” said Michael A. Levi, “ an energy and environmental senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations” according to the NY Times.

Industry-friendly policies made and continued by Presidents Bush and Obama, respectively, paired with technological advances have allowed the extraction of oil and gas possible. However, this increase in U.S. energy production has seen negative effects where oil drilling in common; places such as Utah and Wyomig have experienced severe air quality problems. Hydraulic fracturing, or fracking—a drilling technique that uses highly pressurized water, sand and chemical lubricants to force oil and gas from rock formations—has been blamed for wastewater problems and for threatening the status of several rare or endangered species.

Right now, there is the current issue of not enough demand. So far, the country is producing so much that there are worries there might not be enough demand to suck up production surplus. This could lead to increased gas prices rather than decreased.

''Ramping up production was a high priority,'' said Gale Norton, a member of the task force and the secretary of the Interior at the time. ''We hated being at the mercy of other countries, and we were determined to change that.'

-adding later-: f there is a loser in this boom, it is the environment. Water experts say aquifers in the desert area could run dry if fracking continues expanding, and oil executives concede they need to reduce water consumption. Yet environmental concerns, from polluted air to greenhouse gas emissions, have gained little traction in the Permian Basin or other outposts of the energy expansion.