HOUSE OVERSIGHT 028626 U.S. oil production has reached its highest level in two decades, while imports have fallen dramatically. A system built to import oil and deliver it to coastal refineries has become ill-equipped to handle rising production in Texas, North Dakota and Canada's Alberta province. "All of the pipes are pointed in the wrong direction," says Harold York, an oil researcher at Wood Mackenzie. "We are turning the last 70 years of oil-industry history in North America on its head, and we are turning it on its head in the next 10 to 15 years." With oil prices persistently above $100 a barrel, companies drilling new wells don't want to forgo revenue while they wait years for new pipelines. That leaves them with trucks, trains and barges to move an increasing amount of crude. Oil delivered to refineries by trucks grew 38% from 2011 to 2012, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, while crude on barges grew 53% and rail deliveries quadrupled. Although alternatives are growing rapidly, pipelines and oceangoing tankers remain the primary method for delivering crude to refineries. In the Eagle Ford, a large four-year-old South Texas oil field, production has grown to more than 500,000 barrels a day, from less than 1,000 in 2009, according to state statistics. Getting that torrent out of the sparsely populated region has required modifications to the oil-delivery system. For example, last year NuStar reversed a 16-inch pipeline built to carry crude imported from Africa and Europe northward from the Port of Corpus Christi. Now, the pipeline flows south, taking delivery from hundreds of trucks that fill up at individual wells. Some of the 175,000 barrels a day moving through the pipe is loaded onto barges at Corpus Christi and towed toward refineries near Houston. Earlier this year, Phillips 66 began putting some of this crude on ships for a 2,200-mile journey around Florida to its refinery in Linden, N.J. The heavy trucks mo