This is just entirely factually incorrect. The US can and does refine light, sweet crude. It wouldn't be a massive effort for more US refineries currently set to handle heavier and more sour crude to switch to it. More and more refineries have been making the switch especially since the time WTI went so low it went negative.
Most of the rest of the world has a harder time processing heavier and more sour oils. The US led the world in refining technologies, so we have the knowledge and equipment to refine it. This is partially due to the US being so involved in Venezuela's oil industry growth, the US essentially built the refining technology to make Venezuela's oil filds useful and why they were so crushed when relations with the US went bad. Few other refiners are set up to process Venezuela's oil.
So, it makes sense we buy the cheaper stuff we can easily process and sell the easy to process more expensive stuff on the world market. Cheaper refined products for us and we make more profit selling the easier stuff.
You're still just wrong stating "The US is unable to refine the oil it produces". It wasn't until the Obama administration that the US could export oil on the world market. Have you ever stopped to wonder what we were doing with all that oil we were generating for so many decades?[0]
Have you stopped to consider what we're doing with those 8 million barrels we produce every day that don't get exported today?
> Okay - we're unable to refine most of the oil we produce. Is that better?
The US produces ~12 million barrels a day. We export less than 4.
12 - 4 = 8.
Which is bigger, 8/12 or 4/12? Which one is bigger than 1/2?
Or are you saying we just dump 8 million barrels a day into the oceans or something? Have you ever stopped to wonder where that goes?
And you still have no answer for what we did with all the oil we generated form the 70s until the 2015. Were we unable to refine most of that oil as well? Where did we put it all?
So no, even saying "we're unable to refine most of the oil we produce" is still just factually incorrect.
> The point is Americans believe the United States is energy dependent, and we are not. Not by a long shot.
Sure, if all global oil trade stopped today refined products would get a lot more expensive overnight. Refineries would have to retool a bit. But overall, the US refines more oil than refined products we consume, so it would be a temporary thing.
Looking at these figures, it appears the US is importing nearly 42% of the oil it needs to satisfy domestic demand and exporting nearly 50% of the oil it produces.
The important takeaway still stands - the US is nowhere close to being energy independent.
I'm not sure why the EIA has these two different numbers between your source and mine. Probably because yours are a much wider term of just "petroleum" whereas mine are more directly "crude oil". So if we're talking refining, we should talk crude oil, so that's why I went with the numbers I did.
Either way though, both data sets points to your statement of "we're unable to refine most of the oil we produce" is wrong. It points to your statement of "The US is unable to refine the oil it produces" as wrong. So we know you're definitely wrong about 2 out of your 3 claims so far.
> the US is nowhere close to being energy independent.
Consumption and production are about equal. Its trivial to convert a refinery from heavy sour to light sweet. It wouldn't be some massive long term extremely expensive change to swap. It just makes more sense to process and consume the cheap stuff and sell the expensive stuff while we've got the cheap stuff equipment still plugged in.
Given that you didn't even know the US could refine domestic oil I think you'll understand why I don't exactly take your opinions on how difficult it would be to change a refinery over. Instead, I'll take the opinions of the people I know who design and worked in the oil refining industry for decades, and the knowledge I've gained by talking with them pretty in depth in how refineries work over the past 20+ years or so.
So once again, if tomorrow global oil trade just stopped, then yeah we'd have a short-term problem. It would be a bad year for oil consumers (practically all of us). It wouldn't be some big death sentence oil-wise, because consumption and production are about equal, some consumption would die down due to higher costs, and it wouldn't take too long to retool the US refineries to only US produced oil. And most of that oil being exported goes out at ports also receiving oil, so retooling things to get the oil that was going out to go to the refineries originally designed for imports wouldn't be some massive task either.
It is nowhere near 42% if you're thinking just crude instead of all petroleum products, which our discussion is about refining crude oil. According to numbers from the EIA which I provided above. 13 - 4 == ???
> As far as your thinking that it's not difficult to change a refinery over, do some research.
I have a pretty long history of knowing about oil refining. Reading patents about cracking heavy crude was literally childhood reading material for me, as a son of an IP lawyer for Exxon working out of the Baytown plant in South Houston. Let me share with you how refining works at a high level, and then you'll hopefully better understand. It is probably literally in my blood, as I grew up less than 10 miles from some of the densest area of refineries on the planet and groundwater contamination is a thing. Over half of my family friends growing up worked at the refineries, the others mostly worked at NASA. Many of my close friends work in the O&G industry.
Start off with the basics. Light, sweet crude. This stuff is trivial to process, we've been doing it for over a hundred years. All you need is a regular distillation tower setup and condensers. Heat it up at the bottom, manage the pressure in the column, and it all separates out into different grades. It is pretty much all shorter chain petroleum products (light), it flows easily, and doesn't have a lot of contaminates (sweet).
Ok, so let's move on to light, but sour. This means the oil has some chemical contaminates, usually sulfur is the big one. So we need to first take this light and sour oil and send it to systems that react with the sulfur compounds but don't react with the rest of the oil to foul it all up. Now we have light and sweet oil, which hey we just mentioned we already know and have equipment to process. Its then the exact same stuff that we had before.
What about heavy? Heavy means it has a lot more long-chain petroleum products in it. Stuff like tar and what not. So now we need to heat this up and have stronger pumps to move it around, so that makes it a lot more complicated even just receiving it. We need to send it to special "crackers", which have lots of fancy catalysts and tightly controlled reaction chambers which break these longer chain petroleum molecules into...lighter, shorter petroleum molecules. What do you know, after we crack it, we're back to having light oil again. And we send that along to the same equipment that we used in the first example.
But what about heavy and sour you ask? Well, that means we need to first crack it, then process the sulfur, and then hey what do you know we're back to working with light and sweet. That thing we already talked about being easy to process.
So what does it mean to take a refinery designed for heavy and sour and change to light and sweet? It means you redo some plumbing to bypass your cracker and sulfur reactors, and just use the regular distillation column you already had. It is massively expensive to go from light and sweet to heavy and sour, but it is pretty trivial to go from heavy and sour to light and sweet. You always have to have the equipment to process light and sweet, but the equipment to handle heavy is kind of rare and very expensive. Literally billions to go one way, and maybe several hundred thousand to go the other way if they didn't leave the valves and plumbing in place to send stuff straight to the columns. The biggest hit to capital is the write down from all the billions of dollars worth of equipment you're no longer using.
The oil industry has already been converting many refineries to process only light and sweet. They're not spending billions in new capex these days what with the uncertain future of oil demand. What does that tell you about the costs?
https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/america-produces-enough-oil-...