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Comment by photochemsyn | Hacker News Reader

DOE has a decent info / FAQ site on the SPI:

https://www.energy.gov/ceser/spr-faqs

It looks like drawdown's been going on at 1 million barrels per day since March, in the name of bringing down gasoline prices. Curiously enough, another approach to doing that - limiting exports - got no traction or interest whatsoever. Here it's important to note that the 1970s-era ban on crude oil exports was lifted cooperatively by Democrats and Republicans in 2015, and the USA is now a net exporter (apparently most imports are crude oil, and most exports are refined products?).

For an open-access report on this situation (Sep 7 2022):

https://www.forbes.com/sites/rrapier/2022/09/07/the-strategi...

Meanwhile LNG exports to Europe seem to be running at full tilt, and oil major profits have never been higher. Seems like the war is delivering to Wall Street as hoped for (although Russian oil money also seems to be flowing in full-tilt, so?).

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> Seems like the war is delivering to Wall Street as hoped for

The stock market closed today at a low for 2022.

Global commodities markets are dominated by players most people have never heard of, who often pay much more than banks. Wall Street has very little to do with the current state of energy markets.

who are they and how do you get in?

> how do you get in?

Be like the market insiders who profit from volatility. Open a futures trading account and go long oil around the elections. Sell sometime in winter.

In energy markets: Vitol, Gunvor, Trafigura, Mercuria, Glencore.

Be some combination of smart, hard working or well connected.

Who are the players?

In energy markets: Vitol, Gunvor, Trafigura, Mercuria, Glencore.

players most people have never heard of

As I understand it, most US refiners in the gulf region are tuned for heavier/sourer crudes than is produced domestically. I'm not entirely sure why that is (maybe a historical artifact due to prevalence of those grades in Latin America?), but the result is that we generally want to import crudes for refining.

Which is to say: the light/sweet crudes produced domestically are not the ideal feedstocks for our refiners, so restricting exports of those wouldn't necessarily increase supply of refined products.

I think they are tuned for mixing heavy dirty crude from places like Venezuela with light clean crude from Texas. It’s the best way to leverage Venezuelan oil (without mixing in higher quality crude, refining is very difficult).

Maybe that’s why they wanted Keystone XL? Since Venezuela is basically out of commission, use Albertan oil instead?

One of the key factors of gas prices is refining capacity: https://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/hist/LeafHandler.ashx?n=PET&s=M...

We had a draw down during covid, which included some plants that were near their planned End of Life being decommissioned early.

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