It is however in OPEC, and it is very much foreign. A fair amount of oil coming out of there is making its way here. If we said no, what little stability that excuse for a country and cease to exist.
Okay, wait a minute. A bit of confusion here.
Not all oil imported to the US is burned here. Particularly for Venezuela. They have very heavy, viscous oil. The Gulf Coast refineries can handle it but other refineries often cannot. So Venezuela does indeed import oil to the US, but the products from refining mostly just go back out.
There’s another subtle item you’re likely not aware of. There is an item called “refinery gain”. Almost no other country than the US has this, because not many do as much refining. It works like this. Crude arrives and it has a certain density and thus, volume. A barrel is 42 gallons, by definition.
When you refine it — that is, heat it up and extract its constituent parts (gasoline, diesel, kerosene) the total volume of these less dense liquids exceed the volume of crude oil that flowed into the refinery. So X barrels of liquid come in, and X plus 30% come out.
The EIA counts this increase as “oil production”. I swear to God. Look up Refinery Gain. If you bring in 10 million barrels per day, an imaginary additional amount is claimed to have been “produced” — as if it came out of US territory oil wells.
Venezuela’s very dense oil has this effect in it. Big refinery gain, and even though the crude is foreign sourced, the refinery gain is counted as US oil production.
Bizarre. True.