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
There’s many different grades of oil (Light Sweet -> Heavy Sour), depending on what sort of impurities are in it. However, it all needs to be refined to actually get the petroleum products you want like gasoline or diesel, and the refinery infrastructure is different for each grade.
The US built a lot of its refinery infrastructure to deal with heavy crude, because that was what was widely available on the market at the time. However, the shale oil produced from the fracking boom generally produces light sweet crude, which the US doesn’t have the infrastructure to refine.
So you could either spend millions or billions of dollars rejiggering your refinery to handle light crude instead of heavy, or you could just export the Light crude on the open market and import the Heavy crude that you are already set up to handle.
That’s why the US is a _net_ exporter, it imports some oil, but it exports a lot more.
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