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America produces enough oil to meet its needs, so why do we import crude?

389 points by DocFeind 5y ago

human 5y ago
Can anyone explain to me how much different the process to refine light & sweet is different from heavy & sour?
mikewarot 5y ago
Because if we can buy it, and use everyone else's oil up first, we'll be the last to have it, instead of the first to run out.
- usaphp 5y ago
  from the article: "You see, the U.S. does produce enough oil to meet its own needs, but it is the wrong type of oil."
- dekhn 5y ago
  Shhhh, don't let people know the Strategy!
- echelon 5y ago
  > Because if we can buy it, and use everyone else's oil up first, we'll be the last to have it, instead of the first to run out. Furthermore, the US has pricing advantages as oil is traded in USD.
  - sfe22 5y ago
    Not for long though
- eloff 5y ago
  Obviously the extra gets exported, so it doesn't actually work that way. Also Peak Oil doesn't seem like it's going to happen anymore. It looks like we'll phase it out long before we actually run out. Demand will decrease at an ever quickening pace and investment in oil extraction will pretty much die. Most of the cheap to extract oil has already been exploited, so that could lead to oil becoming pretty expensive, pretty quickly. Despite crashing demand.
  - Filligree 5y ago
    "Peak oil" is literally just whatever moment in time oil extraction peaked. It never implied we'd run out, and what you're describing is the expected outcome.
    - munk-a 5y ago
      Peak oil implies that the demand actually reached a level to justify that peak level of extraction and with a decline[1] of the production that level of demand will be unsustainable. If peak oil is reached due to a temporary situation (like a war briefly driving up demand numbers) then maybe it's not an immediate issue - but we'd never have the same supply capacity again. It could be that in the 41st century earth is still producing 100 barrels of oil a year - but that's not a useful amount. Running out isn't the issue - the issue is that we've got an economy geared to consume a specific fossil fuel and constantly growing with a dependency on that fossil fuel - if we suddenly outstrip supply we could be left in a lurch where we have a reduced capability to run the machines that'd let us build machines that are less reliant on oil. 1. The common understanding peak - but even if things just remained level supply-side and demand grows it'd be the same outcome
    - dwater 5y ago
      When I first heard the term ~20 years ago, there was speculation that we would use up the easily extracted oil, and it would just get more and more expensive to produce as we were driven to more challenging sources, to the point that consumers would be driven to other energy sources. And so "Peak oil" referred to the peak of supply, as in the GP's usage. You are implying the peak will be whenever demand tops out, which technically would still be "peak oil" but not in the way it's been used for a couple of decades.
    - eloff 5y ago
      Peak oil was all about the supply side peaking, and what that would mean in an environment of increasing, very inelastic demand. It looks like demand will peak first instead, which is quite different.
  - xerxesaa 5y ago
- vpribish 5y ago
  that's not it at all because A) we produce it and export it and B) we will never, ever, EVER, run out of oil - we will however stop using it - so C) the incentive it to pump as fast as possible while it still has value.
slackfan 5y ago
Oh man, we're starting to repeat Obama-era articles now!
gitaarik 5y ago
Why is nobody mentioning peak oil [0]? Seems to me that is the reason the extraction costs in the US is so high. Because the oil reserves are drying up, and it becomes harder and harder to squeeze out the oil. They are starting to employig techniques like fracking [1] to squeeze the oil out, but that costs a lot more energy, so the produce is lower, so the oil is more expensive. And will keep becoming more expensive as the reserves dry up and the extraction becomes more and more expensive. A good resource on how this works is The Crash Course [2] from Peak Prosperity, where it discusses this in relationship with the financial and environmental factors. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_oil https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_oil [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydraulic_fracturing https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydraulic_fracturing [2] https://peakprosperity.com/courses/crashcourse/ https://peakprosperity.com/courses/crashcourse/
bigmattystyles 5y ago
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- toomuchtodo 5y ago
  Even midwestern farmers continue to shill for corn ethanol to hold on to their subsidies as EVs destroy demand for gasoline and the corn ethanol additive. It's entrenched interests all the way down. https://www.politico.com/news/2021/05/04/biden-electric-vehicle-ethanol-485277 https://www.politico.com/news/2021/05/04/biden-electric-vehi...
  - mbfg 5y ago
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F-yDKeya4SU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F-yDKeya4SU
  - ok123456 5y ago
    EVs make up about 1% of car sales. Hardly "destroying demand for gasoline". We'd run out of lithium way before they even dented gas demand. If you factor in electricity generation from fossil fuels, in addition the lithium mining, your EV is hardly going to save the planet.
- WalterBright 5y ago
  Having energy independence is critical for a nation to control its own destiny. Note that Japan attacked Pearl Harbor bringing the US into WW2 because the US cut off their oil supply. And note that Germany invaded the Soviet Union in order to ensure a supply of oil. Successfully blocking Germany's oil access was a crucial factor in winning WW2. Britain would have sank in WW2 if not for US shipments of gas to it. Without gas, your military is kaput.
- jhallenworld 5y ago
  Manchin and Murkowski were just falling over themselves in glee with this new argument for more drilling: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oT9W0e1T8jQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oT9W0e1T8jQ
chasd00 5y ago
better to drink someone else's milkshake before you drink yours
soperj 5y ago
They wouldn't need to go hat in hand to those other countries if people weren't so adamantly against Canadian oil, since it's mostly heavy oil.
matt123456789 5y ago
So if I understand correctly, US refineries are built to process imported oil, rather than the domestic oil drilled out of US land. Which means that if the US stops importing, it will not have a way to meet domestic consumption demand without building new refineries, or making (presumably) substantial modifications to existing processing infrastructure. What’s the lead time and cost to build that out?
- bena 5y ago
  Regardless, this does seem like a situation where the best time to start that was yesterday and the second best time is today.
- thematt 5y ago
  It's not just a matter of building more refineries to process it. The different API Gravities of the oil are used to output different products. Gasoline, jet fuel, etc. So yes, you could modify refineries (at significant expense) to process different grades of crude, but in order to target different outputs we still need to import the different grades of oil because the refineries end up mixing/matching to get the levels they need. The US produces a lot of light oil, but less of the medium/heavy grades you'll find in Canada or the Middle East.
  - myself248 5y ago
    You seem to be the first to mention, something that I think is of supreme interest: How adaptable are the refineries? All oil must have variations in its properties, and every refinery must be able to cope with a certain amount of variation. If you have a refinery that's built for heavy sour oil, how much lighter and sweeter can it handle without any modifications at all? And how much time and money does it take to broaden its range further? What are the heavier grades used for, I'd imagine stuff like bunker fuel and asphalt? If the prices of those end products went up, wouldn't the market adapt to a certain degree, say using more concrete and less asphalt, etc?
    - thematt 5y ago
thedudeabides5 5y ago
Weird that this is framed as a negative thing. The US is a leader in oil refinement technology, such that there are oil rich Latin American countries (Venezuela and Mexico) that rely on exporting crude and importing refined products from the US to meet THEIR energy needs. This isn't about the US going full 'no import oil', it's about finding the entire west non-Russian sources of crude.
chernevik 5y ago
"politicians, it seems, would rather keep a situation where periodic energy crises give them a cudgel with which to beat an incumbent" What? The politicians that matter _are_ incumbents. Not a great article.
jmclnx 5y ago
Simple, $ When the gas shortages happened in the 70s, a law was pass limiting the prices of US sourced oil sold domestically. It was put in place to lower the "oil shock". I do not know the status of that law, but I assume it still exists. So, US source oil can be sold at a higher price if exported and that forces the US to import to make up the difference. I think there was a loophole that allowed this to happen, probably it was not thought at the time it would be viable to export US oil or US would never have the oil to export.
jhallenworld 5y ago
"overseas oil, even after shipping costs, is often cheaper than domestically-produced crude" This is all you need to know. If we had an oil export tariff, then we would very quickly become oil independent. Buyers in other countries are in competition with Americans for this oil, so if you really want to keep the price low in America, we should have such a tariff. Why should we give away our natural resources like this? Additionally: in these emergency times, a reasonable argument could be made for price controls.
- SiempreViernes 5y ago
  You realise that selling to the highest bidder is pretty far from giving things away?
  - jhallenworld 5y ago
    And how much do they pay to extract the oil from public lands? This is very relevant because of this new thing that just happened. There was an auction for rights to install an off-shore wind farm. The final price was $4.3 billion. This tells you the value of green energy: it's so valuable that you could convince investors and banks to pony up the money. https://www.cnbc.com/2022/02/25/us-offshore-wind-auction-in-ny-nj-raises-a-record-4point37-billion.html https://www.cnbc.com/2022/02/25/us-offshore-wind-auction-in-... So what are the auction prices for oil extraction? https://www.denverpost.com/2021/10/07/john-hickenlooper-oil-gas-drilling-federal-public-lands-blm/ https://www.denverpost.com/2021/10/07/john-hickenlooper-oil-...
    - cpleppert 5y ago
      State commitments in New York and New Jersey mean that off-shore windfarms are guaranteed to be profitable. The cost of extraction doesn't equal the cost of the land or right to drill for oil.
- cryptonector 5y ago
  Price controls have never worked, and never will work, because they cannot work.
roflchoppa 5y ago
It’s simple, “I drink your milkshake, I drink it up.”
munk-a 5y ago
Oil isn't a uniform thing - it's closer to marble than limestone. People import tuscan marble all the time due to the grain and qualities of the piece itself - it's quite the same with oil - not every barrel was created the same and America has some processing facilities specialized to consume a quality of oil not found domestically in large volume.
jeffreyrogers 5y ago
"Oil" isn't one product. It differs widely in chemical and physical properties (viscosity, how much sulfur and arsenic is present, etc.) depending on how/where it was produced. Different refineries are setup to refine different grades of oil and the oil is often blended before shipment to meet the specs the refineries expect. It is often cheaper for the US to import the right grade of oil than it would be to reconfigure the domestic refineries to process all the domestically produced oil. This is also why there are several oil "prices" that you will see quoted, the most common two being WTI and Brent.
- karaterobot 5y ago
  This is a good summary of the article.
- gorgoiler 5y ago
  Thanks for the insight — very interesting. Are there physical properties that make these different oils look different? Would I be able to tell them apart if they were in jars, in front of me?
  - opwieurposiu 5y ago
    Yes. The color and the smell vary a lot. Venezuela and Canada sell a heavy crude that is basically roofing tar. Some spots in west Texas and Malaysia produce something close enough to diesel to just put in your truck and go with no refining. https://kimray.com/training/types-crude-oil-heavy-vs-light-sweet-vs-sour-and-tan-count https://kimray.com/training/types-crude-oil-heavy-vs-light-s...
- selectodude 5y ago
  A good example of this is how extremely light, sweet Saharan Blend is $25 more per barrel than Canadian tar sand.
- ineedasername 5y ago
  What about by products, do some varieties lend themselves better to different petrochemicals? (or petrochecmicals that require a specific variety?)
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
commandlinefan 5y ago
It seems like a good long-term strategic decision to import as much oil as you can get away with, assuming the world will run out of it eventually.
kilotaras 5y ago
"overseas oil, even after shipping costs, is often cheaper than domestically-produced crude + domestic shipping cost" (emphasis mine). One reason that domestic shipping cost is so high is that 1920 Jones Act[0] prohibits shipping between US ports with non-US ships. This drastically reduces competition and increases prices. Hawaii are particularly hit by this, with estimate $1800 per year per family in extra cost [1]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jones_Act_(sailor_rights) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jones_Act_(sailor_rights) [1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/jonesing-to-give-up-russian-oil-hawaii-jones-act-11646176174 https://www.wsj.com/articles/jonesing-to-give-up-russian-oil...
- istjohn 5y ago
  >> One of the primary impetuses for the law was the situation that occurred during World War I when the belligerent countries withdrew their merchant fleets from commercial service to aid in the war effort. This left the US with insufficient vessels to conduct normal trade impacting the economy. Later when the U.S. joined the war there were insufficient vessels to transport war supplies, materials, and ultimately soldiers to Europe resulting in the creation of the United States Shipping Board. The U.S. engaged in a massive ship building effort including building concrete ships to make up for the lack of U.S. tonnage. The Jones Act was passed in order to prevent the U.S. from having insufficient maritime capacity in future wars. [1] 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merchant_Marine_Act_of_1920#National_security https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merchant_Marine_Act_of_1920#Na...
- sirspacey 5y ago
  This is such a fascinating look at how commerce doesn’t just mean “economic commerce.” We experienced this with supply shocks with COVID as well. It’s interesting to balance “have the ability to meet our needs logistically” with “don’t create price cartels that cause inefficiency in the market.” Seems we’d have a vested national security interest in both securing commerce and enabling price competitiveness.
- gowld 5y ago
  That could be fixed by a tariff on underpriced foreign oil.
robomartin 5y ago
I think it is time for those in science and technology to start to demand we stop lying to ourselves. Anyone who has reasonable command of basic mathematics, basic physics and, as a bonus, manufacturing and supply chains can do the math and verify that we are floating in a sea of lies. What are these lies? We can save the planet: When computed as the planetary-scale problem this is, it is very easy to see that the energy and resources we would need to affect change are in a range between impossible and massive. The scale of this fallacy is such that, even if we could do something, it is far more likely to kill all life on earth than to save anything. Fix Climate Change: Same as above. At a planetary scale it is nothing less than laughable to think we can do a thing about any of it. It takes natural processes an unimaginable amount of energy and resources over 50K to 100K years to drop atmospheric CO2 by 100 ppm. We actually have people believing in this religion that says we can affect climate change and save the planet in a 50 year time scale. In other words, 1000 to 2000 times faster than the natural rate of change. Nobody EVER asks them to "show the math". If they did, they could not. This is ignorant nonsense. Stop using oil (petroleum): Impossible. Impossible at a massive scale. The ignorant among us (which is to say, as it pertains to this problem, most people) think gasoline when they think of oil. Well, that's not what we use oil for exclusively. Petroleum is one of the most highly processed materials on this planet. We derive everything from lubricants and plastics to fuel from it. Secondarily, we derive almost everything you can touch and use in your daily lives. Almost everything at a hospital or the company you work for. Manufacturing of everything, from food to medical equipment, computers and clothes would grind to a halt without petroleum. I think I can say that we could not support 7 billion people on this planet without oil and its byproducts. In other words, once again, this is ignorant nonsense. Migrate to electric cars: In the US alone we have somewhere around 300 million vehicles. If anyone with the requisite knowledge took the time to do the math, you would quickly come to the stark realization that a migration to electrics is --from our current context-- impossible. About five or six years ago I wrote a relatively simple simulation model to try to understand this problem. My model told me that we would need to ADD somewhere between 900 GW and 1400 GW of power generation capacity in order to go fully electric. For context, we currently generate about 1200 GW. In other words, we would have to double our capacity. For further context, a single nuclear power plan produces about 1 GW. This means we need to build somewhere in the order of a thousand nuclear power plants, or, on average, twenty per US state. We can't build ONE in 25 years and we are actually talking about doing something that would require a thousand of them as if it were possible. I never had confirmation of my model until Elon Musk was asked this very question not too long ago. For those who think what I just said is nonsense, I'll let him confirm my findings and statement: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TcI6FaaDp8g&t=3510s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TcI6FaaDp8g&t=3510s As Elon says, it's worse than having to double our power output. Our infrastructure cannot handle this. It isn't built to carry and handle twice the power draw. Which means we have to rebuild almost all of it. Imagine having to replace almost every cable and transformer distributing power in the US as a starting point (it is far more complicated than that). So, once again, this is ignorant and stupid. There's more, but I'll stop here. I just heard the US President go on TV and pretty much get behind all of the above, again. The Prime Minister of Canada did a similar thing during a press conference with the leaders of UK and Netherlands (side note: How diluted is he that he decides to talk about this nonsense when Ukraine is going on? I don't understand. Yes, I know, these words are put in front of them in a number of cases to read off a teleprompter. However, we keep living in this "Emperor has no clothes" scenario where everyone is repeating and getting behind a collective set of lies both emotionally and financially. Lies that are easily proven to be so with some of the most basic of mathematical analysis. And, here we are, driving society mad with imaginary nonsense indistinguishable from religion. None of this is to say that cleaning-up our act isn't a good idea. However, the way we are going about it is to lie about both the reasons and plausibility of it. Electric cars are a good idea, but we need a 50 year plan to radically enhance our power generation and delivery infrastructure. A plan that would require a doubling of our generation capacity. It's like building an entire duplicate of all of the power infrastructure in the US. Not a small endeavor. While that happens oil will be crucially important. And oil has to be CHEAP or that infrastructure will be impossible to build. Oil has to be cheap because it is needed not just for the massive transportation requirements of all of the materials, components and systems that will go into doubling our energy production infrastructure, but for all of the byproducts that will be essential for the manufacturing and transportation industries (lubricants, plastics, etc.). And so, we have the US President (and other world leaders) reading what someone else put in front of them, likely from a purely ideological perspective, while completely ignoring the fact that what they are saying, what they want to do, is absolutely impossible form that ideological framework. The first thing a country like the US has to do in order to be able to reach for some of these ideas is exactly contrary to this ideology. We have to drill, extract and transport oil from everywhere in this land. Oil has to be $20 a barrel, not $130. Without cheap oil you cannot have a future full of electric cars. Which means not a chance in hell of "saving the planet" or affecting climate change. And, yes, we need HUNDREDS of nuclear power plants. Solar and wind can't do it alone. If you want to challenge that, be my guest. Do the math on the insanely massive number of batteries and solar panels we have to produce in order to match the output of a 1 GW nuclear power plant (24/7/365 for 50 to 100 years). Calculate all the materials, resources and CO2 that would be consumed and produced in the manufacturing and installation of such a system. And then multiply that by a thousand, because we need about 1200 GW. Get real. We need to start to speak the truth so we can put forth realistic plans for a cleaner future.
caeril 5y ago
We only produce enough oil to meet our needs via fracked shale wells, enhanced recovery methods, etc, all of which comes at great cost, both financial and environmental. I wouldn't expect an economist or an American Jingoist cheerleader to ever crack a geophysics book, but someone should look at the production decline curves of these wells and then take a wild-ass guess how much longer the shale miracle will last. We import oil because "energy independence" (at least from an oil & gas perspective, renewables and coal may be another matter) is a fleeting, rose-colored dream, from which we will soon awake.
N_A_T_E 5y ago
I recall reading we only have oil reserves to meet our demands for 5-15 years if sourced exclusively from ourselves.
andrewjl 5y ago
The simple answer is that oil isn't fully fungible. Sweet vs sour crude, different grades, serve different needs. Different extraction methods are also viable at different price levels, many domestic sources only become profitable at higher levels. (Like the levels we're seeing now. Which are stratospheric.) A good contrarian argument for energy independence is it'll impose a higher floor cost on oil prices, making renewable projects more viable. It would also make expensive one-time upgrades that enhance energy efficiency look better on paper when compared against opportunity costs.
jhoechtl 5y ago
To outsource the devastation of landscape?
oversocialized 5y ago
julianeon 5y ago
Seems disingenuous to not mention that most of that US oil (65%!) comes from environmentally destructive practices, which is a damn good reason to prefer imports. Or, put simply: how much US oil comes from fracking? Not a small number - the aforementioned 65%. Source for this data: the U.S. government. https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=847&t=6 https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=847&t=6 Remember, these aren't small amounts of water either. I live in California, where we have drought conditions. How much water do you think a typical well uses? "Up to 9.6 million gallons of water (!!!!) per well." For just one well! https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/analysis-fracking-waters-dirty-secret/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/analysis-fracking... That whole sentence is worth quoting in full: Oil and natural gas fracking, on average, uses more than 28 times the water it did 15 years ago, gulping up to 9.6 million gallons of water per well and putting farming and drinking sources at risk in arid states, especially during drought. So, here's the thing. The "cost" of that water in the market is just the cost in dollars. But to Americans, and future generations? It's much higher. You can throw a stone at a US map and hit a state that's experiencing drought conditions right now (and that well water is permanently off limits for drinking). If we can slash the real cost - the externality cost - by just buying it from elsewhere, we should. And we do. And that's the right choice, despite what NASDAQ thinks.
- new_stranger 5y ago
  This just hints at how toxic the fracking chemicals used are. It's not just the water, it's the pollution that is compounding this issue. Water always has, and always will recirculate - but pumping dangerous contaminants into our water tables is a big problem that effects current generations as well.
  - dr_dshiv 5y ago
    Evidence please. (Of contaminants in water tables, not the toxicity of oil)
    - op00to 5y ago
      You’re asking for evidence that oil exploration and extraction leaves contaminants in water tables? The US EPA gives 5 easy to understand situations where fracking destroys drinking water through toxic chemicals making it into groundwater. • Spills during the handling of hydraulic fracturing fluids and chemicals or produced water that result in large volumes or high concentrations of chemicals reaching groundwater resources; • Injection of hydraulic fracturing fluids into wells with inadequate mechanical integrity, allowing gases or liquids to move to groundwater resources; • Injection of hydraulic fracturing fluids directly into groundwater resources; • Discharge of inadequately treated hydraulic fracturing wastewater to surface water; and • Disposal or storage of hydraulic fracturing wastewater in unlined pits, resulting in contamination ofgroundwater resource https://www.epa.gov/sites/default/files/2016-12/documents/hf_final_assessment_fact_sheet.pdf https://www.epa.gov/sites/default/files/2016-12/documents/hf...
beloch 5y ago
"Most of the oil produced in the U.S. fields in Texas, Oklahoma, and elsewhere is light and sweet, compared to what comes from the Middle East and Russia. The problem is that for many years, imported oil met most of the U.S.’s energy needs, so a large percentage of the refining capacity here is geared towards dealing with oil that is heavier and less sweet than the kind produced here." Canada, Alberta specifically, produces precisely this kind of oil. In his speech announcing the ban, Biden listed several alternatives to Russian oil that the U.S. would rely on, including Saudi Arabia, but pointedly left Canada out. This is after one of his first acts as President was to scrap a (heavily politicized) pipeline that would have transported heavy Alberta oil to U.S. refinery centres. It's worth asking what is going on here. Why does the U.S. seem to prefer relying on oil from regimes that are as morally questionable as Russia while snubbing a long-time stable supplier that is right next door? Politically, Biden is committed to green energy and, of course, is not going to want to reverse his decision on a pipeline that Trump backed. However, reality is a thing. The U.S. needs heavy oil and isn't getting it as efficiently or environmentally friendly as it could because, as in Canada, infrastructure approval processes have become heavily politicized. Oil will indeed flow from Alberta to U.S. refineries, but mainly via tanker cars. This increases transportation costs and, hence, fuel costs. It also makes spills and accidents, such as occurred in Lac-Mégantic, more likely. It may be time to look at ways to free long-term infrastructure planning and approval processes from the short-term needs of politicians looking for a quick boost in the polls before an election.
gniv 5y ago
This (the various types of crude) is not the real reason, based on what I read before. The US is a major (biggest?) exporter of refined oil products. I think even western Europe gets a significant portion of refined product from the US. There is simply a lot of capacity, built in the 2010s. So the imports of crude are used for refining.
givemeethekeys 5y ago
A moment of silence for all the plebs who'll have to drive to work and back because tech giants can't figure out how to use the internet.
tomohawk 5y ago
Not mentioned in the article, the US is actually a few different oil markets. For example, the east coast has refineries, but they are geared for oil from the middle east. Why? One reason is the Jones Act, which prohibits shipping between US ports except by US crewed/flagged vessels. There basically aren't any of those. So, we ship liquified natural gas from Texas to Europe and Asia, but are not allowed to ship to the east coast or other US ports. The other reason is that pipeline capacity to the east coast is severely constrained. Many planned pipelines have been cancelled. It takes decades with all the NIMBY laws to build one, but only one president to throw all that work out with a decree. Pipeline capacity is further constrained due to regulations for boutique fuels. The gas you can use can vary from state to state. If you start a run of said fuel on the pipeline, you can't serve the whole intended market for when the pipeline was designed. And then there is the whole ethanol thing. It has to get shipped at great expense from the midwest to the coasts where regulations say it must be used.
steve76 5y ago
zip1234 5y ago
The United States should, as a matter of national strategy, move away from oil to the largest extent possible as fast as possible.
- muyuu 5y ago
  oil is too good a resource that any major economy could just move away from it without wrecking their competitiveness, certainly in 2022 still and for the foreseeable future
AceJohnny2 5y ago
Tangential to oil, the US government tracks the availability of "strategic resources" ("critical minerals") via the USGS [1] For example, the US produces no rare earths, mostly because the process of extracting those is enfironmentally-unfriendly and we've closed all our mines that produced them, preferring to outsource production to places that don't care about the environmental impact, like China. From what I remember from the USGS talk many years ago, a lot of the critical minerals required for our modern technology comes from unstable regimes. The US could produce mine many of those locally, but of course it'd take many years to ramp up production (not even mentioning the local environmental impact) [1] https://www.usgs.gov/programs/mineral-resources-program/science/critical-mineral-resources https://www.usgs.gov/programs/mineral-resources-program/scie...
whatever1 5y ago
“Crude oil” is not one thing with standard specifications. It varies wildly from almost mud (e.g. Canadian tar sands) to wine like (Arabic crude). Different refineries are configured for different kinds of crude and it is not easy to switch. So the supplier matters.
credit_guy 5y ago
The answer is simple: America is not a monolith, and it is a free country. It's not a single entity that imports x, exports y, and figures out that it can net out inflows and outflows and just export y-x in the end. It's hundreds of companies, each trying to optimize their own business operations, and ultimately profits. If there are no restrictions from purchasing oil from Russia, or Venezuela, or Libya or whatever, and they find it advantageous to do that, they'll do that. The day the US puts some sanctions, they'll have to scramble and find an alternative. That's the way it is, and it can't be any other way.
Aeolun 5y ago
This was a surprisingly straightforward piece. To the extend that I noticed…
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
somenameforme 5y ago
Can somebody double check some numbers here for me? Because something seems Twilight Zone levels of weird. This article states we use 18.12 million barrels per day, and produce 18.4 million per day. Of course some of that gets sent over to the strategic petrol reserves, but for the most part that is all being used or exported. That's 6.72 billion barrels per year. We have proven reserves (as of the end of 2020) of 38.2 billion barrels. [1] That gives us less than 6 years before we completely run through reserves. But it feels like this can't be true because it would have a huge impact on domestic producers, domestic oil prices (especially given the US' relationship with most oil producing nations), and much more. But this article didn't even bother mentioning this fact. So.... what am I missing? [1] - https://www.eia.gov/naturalgas/crudeoilreserves/ https://www.eia.gov/naturalgas/crudeoilreserves/
- tempestn 5y ago
  Proved reserves don't equal total reserves. As an economic incentive to explore for new reserves arises, new reserves are found. See this graph of proved reserves by year since 1900: https://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/hist/LeafHandler.ashx?n=PET&s=RCRR01NUS_1&f=A https://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/hist/LeafHandler.ashx?n=PET&s=R... Of course at some point there must be a limit, but thus far when there's been sufficient incentive to look, more reserves have been found (including via new technology such as fracking).
landmanmass 5y ago
His stats are from 2020. That’s pre Biden. Biden blocked oil producers from pumping on federal land. I wonder if the numbers are different today.
landmanmass 5y ago
This article is misleading. His stats are from 2020 before Biden barred oil pumping on federal lands and banned fracking!!!!
ComradePhil 5y ago
Oil-rich companies pay enormous money to "climate change" politicians and lobbies in the US to halt progress in oil extraction... so that the value of their oil is higher.
londons_explore 5y ago
There is a flip side to this... We are refining other peoples heavy sour oil, which in turn means many other countries won't have much capacity for such refining. It gives us leverage - if we choose to, we can stop refining heavy sour and stop exporting light sweet, leaving other countries with shortages of refined products, while we still have plenty.
axilmar 5y ago
Besides the cost, it makes sense to consume the other countries' oil before consuming your own. Oil will end some day...
fulafel 5y ago
The right problem to solve is how to ramp down oil use and production, trade minutiae is shuffling deck chairs on the Titanic.

389 points by DocFeind 5y ago

Can anyone explain to me how much different the process to refine light & sweet is different from heavy & sour?

Because if we can buy it, and use everyone else's oil up first, we'll be the last to have it, instead of the first to run out.

usaphp 5y ago
from the article: "You see, the U.S. does produce enough oil to meet its own needs, but it is the wrong type of oil."
dekhn 5y ago
Shhhh, don't let people know the Strategy!
echelon 5y ago
> Because if we can buy it, and use everyone else's oil up first, we'll be the last to have it, instead of the first to run out. Furthermore, the US has pricing advantages as oil is traded in USD.
- sfe22 5y ago
  Not for long though
eloff 5y ago
Obviously the extra gets exported, so it doesn't actually work that way. Also Peak Oil doesn't seem like it's going to happen anymore. It looks like we'll phase it out long before we actually run out. Demand will decrease at an ever quickening pace and investment in oil extraction will pretty much die. Most of the cheap to extract oil has already been exploited, so that could lead to oil becoming pretty expensive, pretty quickly. Despite crashing demand.
- Filligree 5y ago
  "Peak oil" is literally just whatever moment in time oil extraction peaked. It never implied we'd run out, and what you're describing is the expected outcome.
  - munk-a 5y ago
    Peak oil implies that the demand actually reached a level to justify that peak level of extraction and with a decline[1] of the production that level of demand will be unsustainable. If peak oil is reached due to a temporary situation (like a war briefly driving up demand numbers) then maybe it's not an immediate issue - but we'd never have the same supply capacity again. It could be that in the 41st century earth is still producing 100 barrels of oil a year - but that's not a useful amount. Running out isn't the issue - the issue is that we've got an economy geared to consume a specific fossil fuel and constantly growing with a dependency on that fossil fuel - if we suddenly outstrip supply we could be left in a lurch where we have a reduced capability to run the machines that'd let us build machines that are less reliant on oil. 1. The common understanding peak - but even if things just remained level supply-side and demand grows it'd be the same outcome
  - dwater 5y ago
    When I first heard the term ~20 years ago, there was speculation that we would use up the easily extracted oil, and it would just get more and more expensive to produce as we were driven to more challenging sources, to the point that consumers would be driven to other energy sources. And so "Peak oil" referred to the peak of supply, as in the GP's usage. You are implying the peak will be whenever demand tops out, which technically would still be "peak oil" but not in the way it's been used for a couple of decades.
  - eloff 5y ago
    Peak oil was all about the supply side peaking, and what that would mean in an environment of increasing, very inelastic demand. It looks like demand will peak first instead, which is quite different.
- xerxesaa 5y ago
vpribish 5y ago
that's not it at all because A) we produce it and export it and B) we will never, ever, EVER, run out of oil - we will however stop using it - so C) the incentive it to pump as fast as possible while it still has value.

slackfan 5y ago

Oh man, we're starting to repeat Obama-era articles now!

gitaarik 5y ago

Why is nobody mentioning peak oil [0]? Seems to me that is the reason the extraction costs in the US is so high. Because the oil reserves are drying up, and it becomes harder and harder to squeeze out the oil. They are starting to employig techniques like fracking [1] to squeeze the oil out, but that costs a lot more energy, so the produce is lower, so the oil is more expensive. And will keep becoming more expensive as the reserves dry up and the extraction becomes more and more expensive. A good resource on how this works is The Crash Course [2] from Peak Prosperity, where it discusses this in relationship with the financial and environmental factors. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_oil https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_oil [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydraulic_fracturing https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydraulic_fracturing [2] https://peakprosperity.com/courses/crashcourse/ https://peakprosperity.com/courses/crashcourse/

bigmattystyles 5y ago

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
toomuchtodo 5y ago
Even midwestern farmers continue to shill for corn ethanol to hold on to their subsidies as EVs destroy demand for gasoline and the corn ethanol additive. It's entrenched interests all the way down. https://www.politico.com/news/2021/05/04/biden-electric-vehicle-ethanol-485277 https://www.politico.com/news/2021/05/04/biden-electric-vehi...
- mbfg 5y ago
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F-yDKeya4SU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F-yDKeya4SU
- ok123456 5y ago
  EVs make up about 1% of car sales. Hardly "destroying demand for gasoline". We'd run out of lithium way before they even dented gas demand. If you factor in electricity generation from fossil fuels, in addition the lithium mining, your EV is hardly going to save the planet.
WalterBright 5y ago
Having energy independence is critical for a nation to control its own destiny. Note that Japan attacked Pearl Harbor bringing the US into WW2 because the US cut off their oil supply. And note that Germany invaded the Soviet Union in order to ensure a supply of oil. Successfully blocking Germany's oil access was a crucial factor in winning WW2. Britain would have sank in WW2 if not for US shipments of gas to it. Without gas, your military is kaput.
jhallenworld 5y ago
Manchin and Murkowski were just falling over themselves in glee with this new argument for more drilling: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oT9W0e1T8jQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oT9W0e1T8jQ

chasd00 5y ago

better to drink someone else's milkshake before you drink yours

soperj 5y ago

They wouldn't need to go hat in hand to those other countries if people weren't so adamantly against Canadian oil, since it's mostly heavy oil.

matt123456789 5y ago

So if I understand correctly, US refineries are built to process imported oil, rather than the domestic oil drilled out of US land. Which means that if the US stops importing, it will not have a way to meet domestic consumption demand without building new refineries, or making (presumably) substantial modifications to existing processing infrastructure. What’s the lead time and cost to build that out?

bena 5y ago
Regardless, this does seem like a situation where the best time to start that was yesterday and the second best time is today.
thematt 5y ago
It's not just a matter of building more refineries to process it. The different API Gravities of the oil are used to output different products. Gasoline, jet fuel, etc. So yes, you could modify refineries (at significant expense) to process different grades of crude, but in order to target different outputs we still need to import the different grades of oil because the refineries end up mixing/matching to get the levels they need. The US produces a lot of light oil, but less of the medium/heavy grades you'll find in Canada or the Middle East.
- myself248 5y ago
  You seem to be the first to mention, something that I think is of supreme interest: How adaptable are the refineries? All oil must have variations in its properties, and every refinery must be able to cope with a certain amount of variation. If you have a refinery that's built for heavy sour oil, how much lighter and sweeter can it handle without any modifications at all? And how much time and money does it take to broaden its range further? What are the heavier grades used for, I'd imagine stuff like bunker fuel and asphalt? If the prices of those end products went up, wouldn't the market adapt to a certain degree, say using more concrete and less asphalt, etc?
  - thematt 5y ago

thedudeabides5 5y ago

Weird that this is framed as a negative thing. The US is a leader in oil refinement technology, such that there are oil rich Latin American countries (Venezuela and Mexico) that rely on exporting crude and importing refined products from the US to meet THEIR energy needs. This isn't about the US going full 'no import oil', it's about finding the entire west non-Russian sources of crude.

chernevik 5y ago

"politicians, it seems, would rather keep a situation where periodic energy crises give them a cudgel with which to beat an incumbent" What? The politicians that matter _are_ incumbents. Not a great article.

jmclnx 5y ago

Simple, $ When the gas shortages happened in the 70s, a law was pass limiting the prices of US sourced oil sold domestically. It was put in place to lower the "oil shock". I do not know the status of that law, but I assume it still exists. So, US source oil can be sold at a higher price if exported and that forces the US to import to make up the difference. I think there was a loophole that allowed this to happen, probably it was not thought at the time it would be viable to export US oil or US would never have the oil to export.

jhallenworld 5y ago

"overseas oil, even after shipping costs, is often cheaper than domestically-produced crude" This is all you need to know. If we had an oil export tariff, then we would very quickly become oil independent. Buyers in other countries are in competition with Americans for this oil, so if you really want to keep the price low in America, we should have such a tariff. Why should we give away our natural resources like this? Additionally: in these emergency times, a reasonable argument could be made for price controls.

SiempreViernes 5y ago
You realise that selling to the highest bidder is pretty far from giving things away?
- jhallenworld 5y ago
  And how much do they pay to extract the oil from public lands? This is very relevant because of this new thing that just happened. There was an auction for rights to install an off-shore wind farm. The final price was $4.3 billion. This tells you the value of green energy: it's so valuable that you could convince investors and banks to pony up the money. https://www.cnbc.com/2022/02/25/us-offshore-wind-auction-in-ny-nj-raises-a-record-4point37-billion.html https://www.cnbc.com/2022/02/25/us-offshore-wind-auction-in-... So what are the auction prices for oil extraction? https://www.denverpost.com/2021/10/07/john-hickenlooper-oil-gas-drilling-federal-public-lands-blm/ https://www.denverpost.com/2021/10/07/john-hickenlooper-oil-...
  - cpleppert 5y ago
    State commitments in New York and New Jersey mean that off-shore windfarms are guaranteed to be profitable. The cost of extraction doesn't equal the cost of the land or right to drill for oil.
cryptonector 5y ago
Price controls have never worked, and never will work, because they cannot work.

roflchoppa 5y ago

It’s simple, “I drink your milkshake, I drink it up.”

munk-a 5y ago

Oil isn't a uniform thing - it's closer to marble than limestone. People import tuscan marble all the time due to the grain and qualities of the piece itself - it's quite the same with oil - not every barrel was created the same and America has some processing facilities specialized to consume a quality of oil not found domestically in large volume.

jeffreyrogers 5y ago

"Oil" isn't one product. It differs widely in chemical and physical properties (viscosity, how much sulfur and arsenic is present, etc.) depending on how/where it was produced. Different refineries are setup to refine different grades of oil and the oil is often blended before shipment to meet the specs the refineries expect. It is often cheaper for the US to import the right grade of oil than it would be to reconfigure the domestic refineries to process all the domestically produced oil. This is also why there are several oil "prices" that you will see quoted, the most common two being WTI and Brent.

karaterobot 5y ago
This is a good summary of the article.
gorgoiler 5y ago
Thanks for the insight — very interesting. Are there physical properties that make these different oils look different? Would I be able to tell them apart if they were in jars, in front of me?
- opwieurposiu 5y ago
  Yes. The color and the smell vary a lot. Venezuela and Canada sell a heavy crude that is basically roofing tar. Some spots in west Texas and Malaysia produce something close enough to diesel to just put in your truck and go with no refining. https://kimray.com/training/types-crude-oil-heavy-vs-light-sweet-vs-sour-and-tan-count https://kimray.com/training/types-crude-oil-heavy-vs-light-s...
selectodude 5y ago
A good example of this is how extremely light, sweet Saharan Blend is $25 more per barrel than Canadian tar sand.
ineedasername 5y ago
What about by products, do some varieties lend themselves better to different petrochemicals? (or petrochecmicals that require a specific variety?)

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

commandlinefan 5y ago

It seems like a good long-term strategic decision to import as much oil as you can get away with, assuming the world will run out of it eventually.

kilotaras 5y ago

"overseas oil, even after shipping costs, is often cheaper than domestically-produced crude + domestic shipping cost" (emphasis mine). One reason that domestic shipping cost is so high is that 1920 Jones Act[0] prohibits shipping between US ports with non-US ships. This drastically reduces competition and increases prices. Hawaii are particularly hit by this, with estimate $1800 per year per family in extra cost [1]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jones_Act_(sailor_rights) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jones_Act_(sailor_rights) [1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/jonesing-to-give-up-russian-oil-hawaii-jones-act-11646176174 https://www.wsj.com/articles/jonesing-to-give-up-russian-oil...

istjohn 5y ago
>> One of the primary impetuses for the law was the situation that occurred during World War I when the belligerent countries withdrew their merchant fleets from commercial service to aid in the war effort. This left the US with insufficient vessels to conduct normal trade impacting the economy. Later when the U.S. joined the war there were insufficient vessels to transport war supplies, materials, and ultimately soldiers to Europe resulting in the creation of the United States Shipping Board. The U.S. engaged in a massive ship building effort including building concrete ships to make up for the lack of U.S. tonnage. The Jones Act was passed in order to prevent the U.S. from having insufficient maritime capacity in future wars. [1] 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merchant_Marine_Act_of_1920#National_security https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merchant_Marine_Act_of_1920#Na...
sirspacey 5y ago
This is such a fascinating look at how commerce doesn’t just mean “economic commerce.” We experienced this with supply shocks with COVID as well. It’s interesting to balance “have the ability to meet our needs logistically” with “don’t create price cartels that cause inefficiency in the market.” Seems we’d have a vested national security interest in both securing commerce and enabling price competitiveness.
gowld 5y ago
That could be fixed by a tariff on underpriced foreign oil.

robomartin 5y ago

I think it is time for those in science and technology to start to demand we stop lying to ourselves. Anyone who has reasonable command of basic mathematics, basic physics and, as a bonus, manufacturing and supply chains can do the math and verify that we are floating in a sea of lies. What are these lies? We can save the planet: When computed as the planetary-scale problem this is, it is very easy to see that the energy and resources we would need to affect change are in a range between impossible and massive. The scale of this fallacy is such that, even if we could do something, it is far more likely to kill all life on earth than to save anything. Fix Climate Change: Same as above. At a planetary scale it is nothing less than laughable to think we can do a thing about any of it. It takes natural processes an unimaginable amount of energy and resources over 50K to 100K years to drop atmospheric CO2 by 100 ppm. We actually have people believing in this religion that says we can affect climate change and save the planet in a 50 year time scale. In other words, 1000 to 2000 times faster than the natural rate of change. Nobody EVER asks them to "show the math". If they did, they could not. This is ignorant nonsense. Stop using oil (petroleum): Impossible. Impossible at a massive scale. The ignorant among us (which is to say, as it pertains to this problem, most people) think gasoline when they think of oil. Well, that's not what we use oil for exclusively. Petroleum is one of the most highly processed materials on this planet. We derive everything from lubricants and plastics to fuel from it. Secondarily, we derive almost everything you can touch and use in your daily lives. Almost everything at a hospital or the company you work for. Manufacturing of everything, from food to medical equipment, computers and clothes would grind to a halt without petroleum. I think I can say that we could not support 7 billion people on this planet without oil and its byproducts. In other words, once again, this is ignorant nonsense. Migrate to electric cars: In the US alone we have somewhere around 300 million vehicles. If anyone with the requisite knowledge took the time to do the math, you would quickly come to the stark realization that a migration to electrics is --from our current context-- impossible. About five or six years ago I wrote a relatively simple simulation model to try to understand this problem. My model told me that we would need to ADD somewhere between 900 GW and 1400 GW of power generation capacity in order to go fully electric. For context, we currently generate about 1200 GW. In other words, we would have to double our capacity. For further context, a single nuclear power plan produces about 1 GW. This means we need to build somewhere in the order of a thousand nuclear power plants, or, on average, twenty per US state. We can't build ONE in 25 years and we are actually talking about doing something that would require a thousand of them as if it were possible. I never had confirmation of my model until Elon Musk was asked this very question not too long ago. For those who think what I just said is nonsense, I'll let him confirm my findings and statement: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TcI6FaaDp8g&t=3510s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TcI6FaaDp8g&t=3510s As Elon says, it's worse than having to double our power output. Our infrastructure cannot handle this. It isn't built to carry and handle twice the power draw. Which means we have to rebuild almost all of it. Imagine having to replace almost every cable and transformer distributing power in the US as a starting point (it is far more complicated than that). So, once again, this is ignorant and stupid. There's more, but I'll stop here. I just heard the US President go on TV and pretty much get behind all of the above, again. The Prime Minister of Canada did a similar thing during a press conference with the leaders of UK and Netherlands (side note: How diluted is he that he decides to talk about this nonsense when Ukraine is going on? I don't understand. Yes, I know, these words are put in front of them in a number of cases to read off a teleprompter. However, we keep living in this "Emperor has no clothes" scenario where everyone is repeating and getting behind a collective set of lies both emotionally and financially. Lies that are easily proven to be so with some of the most basic of mathematical analysis. And, here we are, driving society mad with imaginary nonsense indistinguishable from religion. None of this is to say that cleaning-up our act isn't a good idea. However, the way we are going about it is to lie about both the reasons and plausibility of it. Electric cars are a good idea, but we need a 50 year plan to radically enhance our power generation and delivery infrastructure. A plan that would require a doubling of our generation capacity. It's like building an entire duplicate of all of the power infrastructure in the US. Not a small endeavor. While that happens oil will be crucially important. And oil has to be CHEAP or that infrastructure will be impossible to build. Oil has to be cheap because it is needed not just for the massive transportation requirements of all of the materials, components and systems that will go into doubling our energy production infrastructure, but for all of the byproducts that will be essential for the manufacturing and transportation industries (lubricants, plastics, etc.). And so, we have the US President (and other world leaders) reading what someone else put in front of them, likely from a purely ideological perspective, while completely ignoring the fact that what they are saying, what they want to do, is absolutely impossible form that ideological framework. The first thing a country like the US has to do in order to be able to reach for some of these ideas is exactly contrary to this ideology. We have to drill, extract and transport oil from everywhere in this land. Oil has to be $20 a barrel, not $130. Without cheap oil you cannot have a future full of electric cars. Which means not a chance in hell of "saving the planet" or affecting climate change. And, yes, we need HUNDREDS of nuclear power plants. Solar and wind can't do it alone. If you want to challenge that, be my guest. Do the math on the insanely massive number of batteries and solar panels we have to produce in order to match the output of a 1 GW nuclear power plant (24/7/365 for 50 to 100 years). Calculate all the materials, resources and CO2 that would be consumed and produced in the manufacturing and installation of such a system. And then multiply that by a thousand, because we need about 1200 GW. Get real. We need to start to speak the truth so we can put forth realistic plans for a cleaner future.

caeril 5y ago

We only produce enough oil to meet our needs via fracked shale wells, enhanced recovery methods, etc, all of which comes at great cost, both financial and environmental. I wouldn't expect an economist or an American Jingoist cheerleader to ever crack a geophysics book, but someone should look at the production decline curves of these wells and then take a wild-ass guess how much longer the shale miracle will last. We import oil because "energy independence" (at least from an oil & gas perspective, renewables and coal may be another matter) is a fleeting, rose-colored dream, from which we will soon awake.

N_A_T_E 5y ago

I recall reading we only have oil reserves to meet our demands for 5-15 years if sourced exclusively from ourselves.

andrewjl 5y ago

The simple answer is that oil isn't fully fungible. Sweet vs sour crude, different grades, serve different needs. Different extraction methods are also viable at different price levels, many domestic sources only become profitable at higher levels. (Like the levels we're seeing now. Which are stratospheric.) A good contrarian argument for energy independence is it'll impose a higher floor cost on oil prices, making renewable projects more viable. It would also make expensive one-time upgrades that enhance energy efficiency look better on paper when compared against opportunity costs.

jhoechtl 5y ago

To outsource the devastation of landscape?

oversocialized 5y ago

julianeon 5y ago

Seems disingenuous to not mention that most of that US oil (65%!) comes from environmentally destructive practices, which is a damn good reason to prefer imports. Or, put simply: how much US oil comes from fracking? Not a small number - the aforementioned 65%. Source for this data: the U.S. government. https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=847&t=6 https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=847&t=6 Remember, these aren't small amounts of water either. I live in California, where we have drought conditions. How much water do you think a typical well uses? "Up to 9.6 million gallons of water (!!!!) per well." For just one well! https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/analysis-fracking-waters-dirty-secret/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/analysis-fracking... That whole sentence is worth quoting in full: Oil and natural gas fracking, on average, uses more than 28 times the water it did 15 years ago, gulping up to 9.6 million gallons of water per well and putting farming and drinking sources at risk in arid states, especially during drought. So, here's the thing. The "cost" of that water in the market is just the cost in dollars. But to Americans, and future generations? It's much higher. You can throw a stone at a US map and hit a state that's experiencing drought conditions right now (and that well water is permanently off limits for drinking). If we can slash the real cost - the externality cost - by just buying it from elsewhere, we should. And we do. And that's the right choice, despite what NASDAQ thinks.

new_stranger 5y ago
This just hints at how toxic the fracking chemicals used are. It's not just the water, it's the pollution that is compounding this issue. Water always has, and always will recirculate - but pumping dangerous contaminants into our water tables is a big problem that effects current generations as well.
- dr_dshiv 5y ago
  Evidence please. (Of contaminants in water tables, not the toxicity of oil)
  - op00to 5y ago
    You’re asking for evidence that oil exploration and extraction leaves contaminants in water tables? The US EPA gives 5 easy to understand situations where fracking destroys drinking water through toxic chemicals making it into groundwater. • Spills during the handling of hydraulic fracturing fluids and chemicals or produced water that result in large volumes or high concentrations of chemicals reaching groundwater resources; • Injection of hydraulic fracturing fluids into wells with inadequate mechanical integrity, allowing gases or liquids to move to groundwater resources; • Injection of hydraulic fracturing fluids directly into groundwater resources; • Discharge of inadequately treated hydraulic fracturing wastewater to surface water; and • Disposal or storage of hydraulic fracturing wastewater in unlined pits, resulting in contamination ofgroundwater resource https://www.epa.gov/sites/default/files/2016-12/documents/hf_final_assessment_fact_sheet.pdf https://www.epa.gov/sites/default/files/2016-12/documents/hf...

beloch 5y ago

"Most of the oil produced in the U.S. fields in Texas, Oklahoma, and elsewhere is light and sweet, compared to what comes from the Middle East and Russia. The problem is that for many years, imported oil met most of the U.S.’s energy needs, so a large percentage of the refining capacity here is geared towards dealing with oil that is heavier and less sweet than the kind produced here." Canada, Alberta specifically, produces precisely this kind of oil. In his speech announcing the ban, Biden listed several alternatives to Russian oil that the U.S. would rely on, including Saudi Arabia, but pointedly left Canada out. This is after one of his first acts as President was to scrap a (heavily politicized) pipeline that would have transported heavy Alberta oil to U.S. refinery centres. It's worth asking what is going on here. Why does the U.S. seem to prefer relying on oil from regimes that are as morally questionable as Russia while snubbing a long-time stable supplier that is right next door? Politically, Biden is committed to green energy and, of course, is not going to want to reverse his decision on a pipeline that Trump backed. However, reality is a thing. The U.S. needs heavy oil and isn't getting it as efficiently or environmentally friendly as it could because, as in Canada, infrastructure approval processes have become heavily politicized. Oil will indeed flow from Alberta to U.S. refineries, but mainly via tanker cars. This increases transportation costs and, hence, fuel costs. It also makes spills and accidents, such as occurred in Lac-Mégantic, more likely. It may be time to look at ways to free long-term infrastructure planning and approval processes from the short-term needs of politicians looking for a quick boost in the polls before an election.

gniv 5y ago

This (the various types of crude) is not the real reason, based on what I read before. The US is a major (biggest?) exporter of refined oil products. I think even western Europe gets a significant portion of refined product from the US. There is simply a lot of capacity, built in the 2010s. So the imports of crude are used for refining.

givemeethekeys 5y ago

A moment of silence for all the plebs who'll have to drive to work and back because tech giants can't figure out how to use the internet.

tomohawk 5y ago

Not mentioned in the article, the US is actually a few different oil markets. For example, the east coast has refineries, but they are geared for oil from the middle east. Why? One reason is the Jones Act, which prohibits shipping between US ports except by US crewed/flagged vessels. There basically aren't any of those. So, we ship liquified natural gas from Texas to Europe and Asia, but are not allowed to ship to the east coast or other US ports. The other reason is that pipeline capacity to the east coast is severely constrained. Many planned pipelines have been cancelled. It takes decades with all the NIMBY laws to build one, but only one president to throw all that work out with a decree. Pipeline capacity is further constrained due to regulations for boutique fuels. The gas you can use can vary from state to state. If you start a run of said fuel on the pipeline, you can't serve the whole intended market for when the pipeline was designed. And then there is the whole ethanol thing. It has to get shipped at great expense from the midwest to the coasts where regulations say it must be used.

steve76 5y ago

zip1234 5y ago

The United States should, as a matter of national strategy, move away from oil to the largest extent possible as fast as possible.

muyuu 5y ago
oil is too good a resource that any major economy could just move away from it without wrecking their competitiveness, certainly in 2022 still and for the foreseeable future

AceJohnny2 5y ago

Tangential to oil, the US government tracks the availability of "strategic resources" ("critical minerals") via the USGS [1] For example, the US produces no rare earths, mostly because the process of extracting those is enfironmentally-unfriendly and we've closed all our mines that produced them, preferring to outsource production to places that don't care about the environmental impact, like China. From what I remember from the USGS talk many years ago, a lot of the critical minerals required for our modern technology comes from unstable regimes. The US could produce mine many of those locally, but of course it'd take many years to ramp up production (not even mentioning the local environmental impact) [1] https://www.usgs.gov/programs/mineral-resources-program/science/critical-mineral-resources https://www.usgs.gov/programs/mineral-resources-program/scie...

whatever1 5y ago

“Crude oil” is not one thing with standard specifications. It varies wildly from almost mud (e.g. Canadian tar sands) to wine like (Arabic crude). Different refineries are configured for different kinds of crude and it is not easy to switch. So the supplier matters.

credit_guy 5y ago

The answer is simple: America is not a monolith, and it is a free country. It's not a single entity that imports x, exports y, and figures out that it can net out inflows and outflows and just export y-x in the end. It's hundreds of companies, each trying to optimize their own business operations, and ultimately profits. If there are no restrictions from purchasing oil from Russia, or Venezuela, or Libya or whatever, and they find it advantageous to do that, they'll do that. The day the US puts some sanctions, they'll have to scramble and find an alternative. That's the way it is, and it can't be any other way.

Aeolun 5y ago

This was a surprisingly straightforward piece. To the extend that I noticed…

deleted 5y ago

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somenameforme 5y ago

Can somebody double check some numbers here for me? Because something seems Twilight Zone levels of weird. This article states we use 18.12 million barrels per day, and produce 18.4 million per day. Of course some of that gets sent over to the strategic petrol reserves, but for the most part that is all being used or exported. That's 6.72 billion barrels per year. We have proven reserves (as of the end of 2020) of 38.2 billion barrels. [1] That gives us less than 6 years before we completely run through reserves. But it feels like this can't be true because it would have a huge impact on domestic producers, domestic oil prices (especially given the US' relationship with most oil producing nations), and much more. But this article didn't even bother mentioning this fact. So.... what am I missing? [1] - https://www.eia.gov/naturalgas/crudeoilreserves/ https://www.eia.gov/naturalgas/crudeoilreserves/

tempestn 5y ago
Proved reserves don't equal total reserves. As an economic incentive to explore for new reserves arises, new reserves are found. See this graph of proved reserves by year since 1900: https://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/hist/LeafHandler.ashx?n=PET&s=RCRR01NUS_1&f=A https://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/hist/LeafHandler.ashx?n=PET&s=R... Of course at some point there must be a limit, but thus far when there's been sufficient incentive to look, more reserves have been found (including via new technology such as fracking).

landmanmass 5y ago

His stats are from 2020. That’s pre Biden. Biden blocked oil producers from pumping on federal land. I wonder if the numbers are different today.

landmanmass 5y ago

This article is misleading. His stats are from 2020 before Biden barred oil pumping on federal lands and banned fracking!!!!

ComradePhil 5y ago

Oil-rich companies pay enormous money to "climate change" politicians and lobbies in the US to halt progress in oil extraction... so that the value of their oil is higher.

londons_explore 5y ago

There is a flip side to this... We are refining other peoples heavy sour oil, which in turn means many other countries won't have much capacity for such refining. It gives us leverage - if we choose to, we can stop refining heavy sour and stop exporting light sweet, leaving other countries with shortages of refined products, while we still have plenty.

axilmar 5y ago

Besides the cost, it makes sense to consume the other countries' oil before consuming your own. Oil will end some day...

fulafel 5y ago

The right problem to solve is how to ramp down oil use and production, trade minutiae is shuffling deck chairs on the Titanic.