Please keep in mind the US has upgraded many of our refineries to efficiently run on heavy sour (cheap) crude.
Much of our new oil shale production is light sweet crude.
We can have greater trade balance by exporting more of the expensive oil while importing the cheap.
Otherwise, we become less efficient running the light sweet through refineries designed for heavy sour. It will depress our domestic light sweet oil price below the global light sweet. That makes drilling in the US shale less profitable and more money gets invested overseas.
wouldn’t it be more profitable to simply refit the US refineries to handle light sweet crude instead of the sour crude? US light sweet crude is cheaper than comparable overseas light sweet crude.
Do you know for a fact that US light sweet crude is more expensive when it reaches the US refinery than imported sour crude when it reaches the US refinery.
I would presume that anyone running the numbers would check that price differential (between imported sour crude and domestic light sweet crude) against the cost of retrofitting US refineries to handle light sweet crude.
None of those numbers am I privy to.
With all the technicalitys aside, if it lowers our trade imbalance and national debt then I am all for it.