Posted on 03/01/2017 11:40:10 AM PST by SeekAndFind
Headline you don't see too many places:
U.S. oil exports are blowing past expectations
That's from Mike Allen's pretty good new news site, Axios, which is fast becoming one of my favorites. The U.S. is blowing away OPEC and other petrotyrant states with a stunning upsurge in oil sales abroad. Up until December 2015, oil exports weren't even legal from the states. Thirteen months later, we are conquering the market and becoming the Big Dog through our energy companies' rising production, eclipsing every petrotyrant this side of Hugo Chavez.
Get a load of the chart from Forbes.
Which reminds me... who is buying this stuff? Turns out our top customer is Mexico, but there have been months where it was other than Chavista Venezuela itself, the nation whose dictator, Hugo Chavez, many times threatened to shut the U.S. down through the disruption of oil supplies. Its state oil company, PDVSA, buys the most oil in some months for its Curacao refinery. Turns out it's America that can shut the remains of that communist clown show down now.
The tables have turned.
It's great news, of course, but it also leaves one a little rueful. We could have been ruling the oil market eight years ago, had then-President Obama not shut down, demonized, punished and sidelined our magnificent world-class oil industry. Instead, we lost seven long years, 15 if we want to count George W. Bush, who did not do much for the industry either, although the technology for extraction was less advanced.
(Excerpt) Read more at americanthinker.com ...
Still, when one thinks of the mischief that could have been prevented had the U.S. not projected such weakness on the world oil markets over those years.
* Would Ukraine have avoided invasion if the U.S. could put Russia’s petrotyrants on the defensive?
* Would Iran have not chanced taking its oil earnings to build a nuke if it could see we could ‘bury’ them on the oil markets?
* Would the Saudis have gotten started earlier on developing their economy, and thus preventing terrorism to take root, if the U.S. had more oil? Or if the U.S. had the clout to put them out of business?
* Would Ecuador and Indonesia have joined OPEC at all if its clout as a producer were in question?
* Would Venezuela have turned into a hellhole were it not for its heyday of huge oil earnings?
So many serious possibilities.
Peak oil, baby, peak oil.
Go TRUMP!
This is a mistake. We should be keeping our resources, not selling them.
Drill Baby, Drill!
A country that imports 9.4 million BBs of oil a day should not be exporting oil. Makes no sense.
Gotta create that artificial shortage to keep pump prices up. Other wise they’d have to lower the pump price. Can’t have that. There are vacation homes to buy and college educations to pay for. Gotta keep those international stock holder happy!
Not all crude oil is alike, and not all US refineries can refine the same grades of crude. For that matter, there are several types of crude oil we produce here that we cannot process here.
For the rest, due to obstructionism, sometimes there’s no economical way to get the oil from production point to a refinery but there is an economical way to get it to an export terminal. Think Keystone XL and Dakota Access Pipelines.
In some markets it is still more expensive to get it across country rather then on a ship and likewise from some places more money can be made exporting than trying to ship far inland.
The various pipeline projects will address some of that, not all though.
Not if we can’t use them. Most of the oil exported from the US is stuff we can’t process here or that can’t be economically gotten to a US refinery.
Essentially, it’s like complaining that your local gas station is selling off their diesel allocation to someone else when nobody in your area has anything but a gasoline powered vehicle.
We should not be selling crude.
We should be selling petroleum distillates and we should be getting into LNG, bigly.
The USA has TWO major products: Crude oil and GAS. There is a (Yuuuge!) demand for the latter, worldwide.
In a way it does. We import crude oil and export refined petroleum. If we have excess refined petroleum or can make a profit off of crude we import, it makes sense.
Business 101. Take a raw product, refine and sell it for a profit. Is this the best deal for the average American? I don’t know, but suspect it might hurt the average consumer. But businesses are in the business of making money.
LNG tankers are really small nuclear bombs waiting to explode.
From the Energy Information Administration (Gov), we import crude and export petro products.
About 78% of gross petroleum imports were crude oil.
In 2015, the United States exported about 4.7 MMb/d of petroleum to 147 countries. Most of the exports were petroleum products. The resulting net imports (imports minus exports) of petroleum were about 4.7 MMb/d.
200M barrels a year is not much. Trump needs to get oil and gas development ramped up on Federal lands so we are not just a net exporter, but a huge net exporter.
Resource extraction could pay down the federal debt, between selling abroad and to our own heavy industries. It will take a lot of energy to rebuild our infrastructure. Earth movers are gas guzzlers to put it mildly.
If you consider all the resources in the ground, that $20T national debt is more than offset by our assets. We just need to get Congress to quit outspending our revenues.
New nuclear and fusion technologies are in the near future, so we may as well extract and sell off all our oil as quick as possible before it becomes worthless.
You got that right, LNG tankers should never be docked near a city.
You have correctly assessed the problem. Beyond what you’ve outlined, we need, in at least the short term, to use oil exports to drive OPEC out of business! Because in so doing, we take a large step in destroying the means by which the Muslim “world” gains the financial resources it needs to further it’s “jihad” on the non-Muslim “world!” Without oil, the whole Middle East goes back to sand dunes and camels as their money runs out, or at least that is a distinct possibility without oil revenue at the per barrel prices they need to stay afloat financially. Ditto for Russia. They all need $100+ per barrel prices or they go under.
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