1) Iran has been shipping oil north to the Caspian, where it traverses to Russia, who blends it with their own and sells it. Iran gets paid less than they might in this way, but once again we see that money is pretense. The barrels of oil per day out of Iran likely would not change much. They would get more money, but the world would get no more oil. So . . . no reason the price would fall.
2) The really ugly thing is US oil production is not really down all that much. It has recovered from the Covid consumption decline, and that decline was never very much. US max oil production was 12.7 million bpd and that year consumption was 21 mbpd. (In other words “independence” was always contorted definition bullshit. It required counting coal)
3) US production is now 11.7 mbpd. You can’t snap your fingers and get back to 12.7 mbpd because shale wells die so rapidly. You have to drill frantically to overcome the declines in the already existing wells. There are now so many legacy wells that the effort to overcome the cumulative decline may be physically impossible.
4) In other words, oil is finite. So is life, because if you can’t move food from farm to store shelf, people die.
It would be nice when the speculators set pricing they knew that the US was actively increasing leases for new wells on Federal property.
But no... Brandon is rapidly killing domestic oil exploration.