I keep hearing over and over that the US imports all of its gasoline and raw petroleum that it used, however when you look at the numbers its the greatest exporter of oil ever. Wouldn’t it make more sense for the US to just take some that they produce and keep it to sell to its own consumers.
In: Economics
Much of the crude oil extracted in the US today is lighter type crude oil.
“Sweet” or light crude oil tends to be composed of mostly natural gas, gasoline, and diesel range material. Due to the crude oils that were available (and cheap) for much of the 20th century being more “sour” or heavy, many American refineries balanced the max capacity of the different refining equipment and processes in the refinery around a barrel of crude oil containing much more heavy material, often called gasoil and resid. While these heavier parts can be either thermally or catalyticly converted into lighter materials, they require units to be built in a refinery to do so. Because so much of the initial crude oil processed in the US was heavy, these units were built and expanded upon. An example being Marathon Petroleum spending 2 billion dollars in the early 2010s in Detroit to allow them to run heavy Canadian crude oil. In order to shift a “sour” crude oil refinery to process “sweet” crude oil, you would have to expand its front end processing capabilities. The crude oil distillation unit, the first unit crude oil goes through in a refinery, is built around the aforementioned split of oil, and can’t necessarily handle the quantities of lighter materials that would be produced with running a majority of sweet crude.
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