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Comment by causi | Hacker News Reader

It would certainly screw over US allies but it wouldn't do that much good for domestic prices because domestic refineries aren't built to use light/sweet American oil. Domestic production would collapse as domestic oil sat unusable for months. What we need is taxes/regulations to force the building of refineries to process domestic crude.

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Hold on, I'm in Canada, and the story here, is that we don't have domestic refineries, we get gas from US ones, now I hear you guys are told the you don't have domestic refineries too?!

What, is everyone told this???

The commenter your replying to is talking about "sweet" oil. According to this adage, US refineries are setup to process sour oil but in the US we drill for sweet oil. As a result we need to export sweet oil and import sour oil.

I've heard from one person, who delivers oil, that our refineries are able to switch relatively easily. So, I'm unsure what the whole story is, but that's what the other comment was referring to. We definitely do refining in the US and there are several refineries near me.

I'm sure the story is, "Tell em anything just keep the profits high".

If your refineries can process cheap sour oil, they can easily be repurposed into processing expensive sweet oil.

But why would you do that, instead of selling the expensive oil and buying some cheap one back?

It’s all rented from a refinery in Virginia called us-east-1.

We have plenty of refineries tuned for all kinds of crude. The vast majority of US crude gets refined here, and exported as refined products.

That's not to say the industry wouldn't go belly up from suddenly having a bunch of unused, expensive oil refineries, but our ability to refine US oil wouldn't be in peril from a lack of refineries.

>force the building of refineries to process domestic crude.

Who would want to build a refinery when the current President has stated he wants to shut down the fossil fuel industry?

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