” we now actually have a glut of oil in North America (we can’t refine oil as quickly as we can produce it).”
Then why are we buying oil from Saudi Arabia??????
We refine all we produce plus another ~7 million a day imported.
Because for some refineries it's easier to get crude oil from tankers than from domestic pipelines.
Supply chains sometimes work in strange ways. I read somewhere recently that most of the crude oil extracted in Alaska is actually shipped to Asia. Go figure.