The United States is on pace to overtake Russia as the world's biggest producer of oil and natural gas and may already have done so, according to The Wall Street Journal.

In July, the United States produced the equivalent of about 22 million barrels of oil, natural gas and related fuels a day, according to data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) and the International Energy Agency.

While those agencies don't have an estimate for Russian gas output this year, Russia's own forecast for 2013 breaks down to about 21.8 million barrels per day, according to The Journal.

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U.S. production has surged amid extraction of oil and gas from shale-rock formations through hydraulic fracturing (fracking). Russia is having trouble keeping up its production, as it hasn't adopted new technologies like fracking, according to The Journal.

"This is a remarkable turn of events," Adam Sieminski, EIA administrator, told the paper. "This is a new era of thinking about market conditions, and opportunities created by these conditions, that you wouldn't in a million years have dreamed about."

To be sure, the increasing U.S. energy independence doesn't make us immune to developments in overseas energy markets, experts say.

"When we see disruptions in [global] markets, when we see disruptions in maritime transit, it has a direct impact on the price that we pay in the U.S. for energy, the price that we pay at the pump," said Carlos Pascual, State Department coordinator for international energy affairs, according to Platts energy publication.

"It has a direct impact on our economic productivity."

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