Comment by photochemsyn | Hacker News Reader

Comment by photochemsyn | Hacker News Reader

A major reason gasoline, diesel and natural gas prices are spiking is the push to export more fossil fuels from the USA by the oil/gas industry. This was facilitated by the 2015 decision to eliminate the ban on crude oil exports, which Obama/Biden and Republicans backed. It's simple supply and demand: reduce domestic supply by increasing exports to jack up domestic prices and increase profits. Around the same time at least one major domestic refinery was also closed, adding to the domestic supply restriction.

There is some effort to get the ban re-instated as of 2021:

> "Khanna drafted a letter to the White House Monday signed by nine Democrats urging the administration to block the export of U.S. oil, which has been allowed since 2015 when Congress lifted a 40-year-old ban on the practice. Since then, U.S. exports have regularly surpassed 3 million barrels a day, more than the production of major OPEC members such as Kuwait and Iran."

https://financialpost.com/pmn/business-pmn/lawmaker-says-whi...

Maybe I'm an idiot, but I don't understand why we'd be exporting oil while also importing millions of barrels from Russia a month. [1]

Certainly it's more cost effective to obtain it domestically than to import it from the other side of the world?

[1] https://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/hist/LeafHandler.ashx?n=PET&s=M...

different compositions. what we call "oil" actually ranges through so many configurations you might as well think of it the same way we think of juice. sulfur and other impurities can change the game dramatically.

it's also the reason Alberta's tar sands have few importers, because not everyone is capable of refining it (which leads to Canada having to export it, and import foreign oil).

there are refineries in the US that only work effectively on Russian oil -- and I'm sure there's similar issues elsewhere in the world. they can probably adapt but it's not as uniform as we'd think.

Some of it is simply a regional transport issue. The major Russian oil importers appear to be the Pacific Northwest states, by far:

https://www.sightline.org/2022/03/04/pacific-northwest-state...

> "The refineries do not rely on Russian oil equally. Nearly 60 percent of Russian crude imported to Washington went to the Tesoro/Marathon Anacortes refinery, and another 29 percent went to the BP Ferndale refinery. Russian crude made up almost 7 percent of all crude refined at the Tesoro/Marathon Anacortes refinery from 2009 through 2021."

Getting oil from Bakken or Pennsylvania would likely be expensive, and also refineries are optimized to process specific grades/types of crude oil. The best solution would be for the US government to prioritize the transition to renewables in Oregon and Washington.

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