>If we stop processing massive amounts of oil(as will happen soon)
What makes you think oil processing will decline soon? It seems like we have an ever-increasing appetite for the stuff (with a possible exception in Norweigan production) [1].
It’s destroying demand at a massive clip, if the IEA is to be believed [1]. With Riyadh’s elevated break-even price [2] that doesn’t leave them a lot of time.
Last year, yes, for the first time since 1949. But even in 2020, we were importing more crude oil than we were exporting. The difference was due to the refined products that we exported.
> because we are running out of oil, the precious and finite resource that is utterly destroying our planet.
Not really running out. The US is the largest oil producing nation in the world now, and our output is at the highest levels[1] in history. Oil is practically dirt cheap and I don't see it breaking out in price anytime soon.
Although that is true, the US imports less and less oil from Saudi. In fact, it’s been dropping steeply since shale oil became cheaper in 2014 and we haven’t imported less from Saudi since the oil glut of the mid-1980s.[1] I don’t think the US stopping Saudi oil imports is going to worry them as China is their major market now and China is another repressive regime. We should stop protecting their shipping though as we do for the entire globe still.
"Goldman Sachs (GS) predicts that by 2017 the U.S. will be the world’s biggest oil producer."
How accurate is this statement? Is the reason the gasoline prices here are so high ($3.89 here this weekend) is because we don't have enough refineries to convert oil into gas?
> the US runs on diesel. We don't produce much heavy oil so we import it
Diesel is a medium-weight distillate; we can turn light oil into it fine. We refine most of our diesel and import the balance from Canada [2].
> Fracking, anyway, is an economic mirage enabled by cheap credit and expensive oil
Our production costs mirror Russia’s [3][4]. (They’re dwarfed by Saudi Arabia’s fiscal break even.)
Consider citing your comments. I’ve sometimes started writing something as riddled with errors as yours, only to find myself corrected when searching for citations.
I think you might be reading that wrong. It isn’t that the cost of extracting the oil
is so high, but that the budgets of these countries depends on the price of oil being high. When the price drops, they can no longer cover their entire budget and will need to borrow or reduce their spending.
These numbers aren’t related to the cost of extraction (which is a different issue but is also variable between different regions).
We are the world’s largest oil producer [1].
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_oil_pro...
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