Crude is easily $25-35/bbl higher than it needs to be based on exactly your argument and the ramifications thereof.
Hey, if that's OK w/you, it's fine with me...but I must confess to a sentimentality for mkts operating more or less as they should do, you know, informed buyer, informed seller, able to trade freely, no external restraints...all that old-fashioned sort of stuff.
;^)
It’s not my number but that of a professional oil trade journal column filler. Somebody (with a rusted out Singer in his garden) once remarked that oil wealth is a gift of nature and politics and I suspect the price is determined mostly by politics.