aurelius wrote: ↑Mon Oct 31, 2022 6:41 pm
The US exports about 8.5 million barrels of oil per day and imports about 8.6 million barrels of oil per day. Stop buying Saudi oil (don't allow US producers to export oil) and withdraw US military support of the Royal family.
https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/oil ... st%201949.
It would seem with a few initiatives the US could be energy independent? I got to be missing something.
The issue is not producing enough oil, it is refining it into useful fuel.
And it's not that we don't have refining capacity. We do. But. Oil is not all the same. Generalizing and probably butchering the situation: North American wells produce light crude, Arabian wells produce heavy crude. Our current refineries were all built pre-fracking, when we were still massively net importing from Saudis et al. So we are mostly set up to refine the heavy crude. We have not built new refineries that handle the light stuff we are producing, Because Reasons. So even though we produce more than we use, we have to ship basically everything we drill overseas and ship IN everything we refine.
You may know this but I just learned it last night by happenstance.
Could we 'stick it to OPEC' by massively overhauling our national refining infrastructure? Maybe? But given that this would have huge near-term costs, and nebulous, diffuse benefits far off in the future, it's not the kind of project that politicians are going to put their popularity capital behind.
And anyway, this might not hurt OPEC so much as it would hurt the emerging markets that are set up to refine, and rely on, the excess light crude which we export.