The U.S. is rich in oil, but that doesn't make a gas guzzler a smart buy

There is no question, the jump in pump prices these past few years have shaken the economy and challenged households. The upside is that higher fuel prices have fueled the so-called green revolution and high-tech transportation development.

The International Energy Agency, this week published a surprising report on U.S. oil supplies (pdf). According to widespread press coverage (Reuters, CNN), the United States now has enough oil reserves to surpass Saudi Arabia's production by 2017, and to become a net oil exporter by 2030.

So what does that mean to you as a consumer? Is oil about to become so cheap that you should start measuring the garage for a supersized SUV? Don't count on it.

Several things are clear from the report:

• Forty-five percent of the report's projections of excess supply are based on the reduction in American demand for oil since 2008, which has come in part due to more efficient cars, the rising cost of gas, and the economic recession. Much of the future gasoline savings is a result of more aggressive standards that will roughly double fuel economy from current standards by 2025 and increased use of biofuels..

• The rest of the improvement in oil supplies hinges on higher gas prices. The hydraulic fracturing technology needed to recover additional U.S. reserves isn't new. But it is newly cost effective at $4 a gallon. (It wasn't financially feasible when gas cost $2.50 in 2005.)

• Oil prices will still be determined by the world market, regardless of where supplies come from, as associate editor Jordan Weissman points out in The Atlantic.

While the report fosters hope that an oil-based world political crisis isn't imminent, these promising oil reserves are also no panacea.

For starters, the petroleum in these reserves is far heavier than that we have pumped in the past, making it more pollution intensive and expensive to refine into gasoline than Saudi Arabian light, sweet crude.

According to Daniel Sperling, director of the Institute for Transportation Studies at the University of California, Davis, the carbon footprint of drilling for and refining these heavy shale oils is on the order of twice that of shipping and burning Saudi oil. And using up all our proven reserves could have disastrous consequences.