Originally Posted by
MaxQ
It is apparent you have more knowledge regarding the oil/refinery industry than most of us here.
Can you provide a basic explanation of a few numbers that don't fit the rhetoric?
The US extracts about 13.5 million bbls/day of oil.
US refineries use about 16.5 mbl/day.
Yet we not only export crude oil, we seem to be actively encouraging this as national policy.
Is there a basic 101 type reasoning for this?
Total distillate produced in the US is about 21.5 to 22 mbl/day.
Total consumed in US is about 20.5mbl/day.
Is the additional 8 mbl/day produced only natural gas and ethanol equivelencys?
Or do we do "gaming" by including the 10%volume increase from refing and other such things, which change the numbers from a field production perspective to an end product perspective.
Short answer: It's complicated, but there are reasons.
Refineries are optimized for specific types of crude stock (that come from different regions) and are also optimized to produced specific products. That came about based on where crude was economically available from at the time, many decades ago.
The marketplace and logistics systems evolved around that, including extremely costly infrastructure like pipelines and big-ass tankers. Certain types of crude (from certain regions) goes to certain refineries, and the distillate products then go to certain customers.
The US probably could become oil-independent. The problem is that would require a very major re-configuration of refinery and logistics infrastructure. Costly and disruptive.
It would also require big changes to the legal infrastructure to isolate us from the global oil (and gas?) market, which would also be costly and disruptive. And the there would be additional disruption as the global market and economy reacts to our changes. Likely some of that retaliatory in nature (Japan attacked the US in 1941 basically because we cut off their oil).
So in reality it's not happening, unless it comes about in the natural course of recovery after some apocalyptic catastrophe.
Originally Posted by
MaxQ
Do you have insight as to how long the oil production from basins that are asseessable primarily only by fracking will continue to be productive?
(obviously price gets involved.. $100/bbl can encourage a lot more drilling than $60 oil)
As you say, higher prices will justify access to additional deposits which are not economical to produce at lower prices. That's not an infinite sliding scale, but basically we've just barely scratched the surface of frackable reserves (in the US). It's also expected that technological advances will increase access even at lower prices.