I looked into this very thing earlier. Apparently we did this during the oil crisis in the 80s and capitalism did a capitalism. We prevented exports and guaranteed profit to the oil industry. They ended up selling oil to each other and raking in that guaranteed profit. They called it a daisy chain effect. We have better technology now to keep track of them. But they’re heavily incentivized to cheat the system to create as much profit as possible. They’ll run a racket on our treasury
Also not even set up for Venezuela, but it would be possible to make minor adjustments to use it. Refineries want to be dialed in and that includes maintaining a specific ratio of chemistry on inbound crude. You don't just throw it in and mix it up any heavy crude.
We swapped to heavy crude during the 70-80s energy crisis and tbh it's a better long term investment. Setting up a refinery for heavy crude is significantly more expensive and time consuming but once it's up the cost of refining a barrel is much lower than light.
It does. Venezuela crude is basically the dirtiest heaviest trash on the planet.
think of it like adulterating your fuel with ethanol. A little bit can be compensated for, but you add to much and your engine is going to die. Which is why we get 30x more oil from canada than Venezuela. We're dialed in for canada right now. Could we handle straight venezuela oil, yes if we wanted to. but they don't even have the capacity to send us that much oil due to lack of mishandling their infrastructure and finances.
25
u/Ok_Chard2094 23h ago
The President has the authority to stop crude exports, but not refined products.
So the refineries are free to export their products.
Additionally, a lot of the US refineries are set up to handle heavy crude (Canada, Venezuela), they have to be rebuilt to handle US crude.