Here is some great data on Imports/exports.

https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/oil-and-petroleum-products/imports-and-exports.php

The United States became a total petroleum net exporter in 2020
In 2020, the United States became a net exporter of petroleum for the first time since at least 1949.1 In 2022, total petroleum exports were about 9.52 million barrels per day (b/d) and total petroleum imports were about 8.33 million b/d, making the United States an annual net total petroleum exporter for the third year in a row. Total petroleum net exports were about 1.19 million b/d in 2022. Also in 2022, the United States produced2 about 20.08 million b/d of petroleum and consumed3 about 20.01 million b/d. Although U.S. annual total petroleum exports were greater than total petroleum imports in 2020, 2021, and 2022, the United States still imported some crude oil and petroleum products from other countries to help to supply domestic demand for petroleum and to supply international markets.

The United States remained a net crude oil importer in 2022, importing about 6.28 million b/d of crude oil and exporting about 3.58 million b/d. Some of the crude oil that the U.S. imports is refined by U.S. refineries into petroleum products—such as gasoline, heating oil, diesel fuel, and jet fuel—that the U.S. later exports. Also, some of imported petroleum may be stored and later exported.

It's pretty funny how so many people haven't yet realized that MAGA Media is feeding you BS narratives all day every day and happily monetizing your ignorance.

Newsflash -- The government, including the president, does very little to influence oil production compared to The Market.

Ayup. Just as swooned and misled as the left.

In general, our refineries are setup to refine oil from the middle east.  To refine oil produced in the US, we have to send it to Mexico, then it's set back to the US as gas.

Free market, blah blah blah, but I really wish it were never legal to export strategic products/elements.

Corn prices would be 30%+ lower without the ethanol scam.

LIES, same as when we were told this with Idiot Trump!

Perhaps not immediate production, but production in the long run has been affected.

Biden halted leasing in ANWR.
He paused leasing on federal lands and off-shore.
He slowed down the approval of drilling permits - almost doubling the time it takes to get approved.
 

I agree. It's like ignorance is bliss at this point.

Or they just put everyone on ignore that makes them uncomfortable and threatens their ignorance.

My understanding is that all of that affects activity many years in the future, and regardless it's a very small segment of the total market.

Russia is in a state of war with export restrictions placed on it and vital pieces of energy infrastructured damaged or outright destroyed.

U.S. and Saudi relations are at a record low due to Joe Biden's personal insults and allegations made regarding the Crown Prince, MBS.   I don't think U.S. and Saudi relations have ever been this bad and as a consequence Saudi Arabia has denied multiple U.S. requests to increase oil production. So, their low output is intentional.

So yes, U.S. oil production is higher right now, but that's a bit like being valedictorian of your summer school.

Yet willful ignorance will persist.

I saw a presentation about 15 years ago saying that the Saudi break even price was something like $100 a barrel because it was the only thing that allowed their welfare society.

Apparently it was still profitable for the Sheikhs as it kept the commoners from overthrowing them.

Attached File

Demand is up, reserves are gone.. Simple.

But what the political spin is that it's corporate greed. They are blaming inflation on corporate greed.

I don't believe the report.  If we are producing so much, how come our strategic oil reserves are so very low?

Why would we take oil off the market in an already expensive situation?

Because the SPR is the most important oil in the world….duh!  

Yes that was sarcasm. Don’t shoot me.

Another factor that the government had a direct effect on is oil transportation cost.  IIRC, on his first day in Office Biden shut down the keystone pipeline. Pipelines move oil at a much lower cost than trains, and particularly trucks. So, the cost of transport oil from the field to the refinery is far higher now than it was when Biden took office. That is contributing noticeably to inflation, because so many things have a transportation component to their cost. Including the stuff you buy from Amazon.

Alright. I'm exhausted from several hours of meetings today. And more tomorrow.  Yay management meetings. So this might be a little shorter than I hoped. But, alas this is what you get.



SPR:

The SPR is, currently, pretty useless and a political tool at best. The government should get out of managing it, sell it off and let private companies utilize it for storage.  It was an idea in the 1970's, was built in the 1980's.  The idea was, at that time, the US was going to become completely dependent on foreign oil.  During the late 1980's and early 1990's we were down to the 4m BDP of domestic production - a far cry from what we are doing now. It was a theory that the US was going to "Run out of oil" - so we had to have several days of oil in reserve in case of war.

We currently produce the lions share of what we use, our hat (Canada) and the pants to the south (Mexico, Central america, South america) produce the rest of it.  We don't need it anymore.  We're much more secure producing our own oil, than having anyone else produce oil for us. Easy as that.  Not only that, private storage has increased by approximately 1 BILLION barrels and continues to increase every year. I had another thread on this a bit ago, you fucks dig it up. Stop talking about the SPR.  The private sector does everything better than the government. Let the private sector manage it, we're not going to run out of oil anytime soon. Having strategic production around the US is a lot more war proof, than having a few sites that could easily be cut off from refineries.  

The bottle neck is and will be refineries. Because they're too expensive to let sit idle.  That's basic economic fundamentals.


Keystone XL - Aka KXL.

The KXL was and never will be built. When it was first proposed, Alberta was continuing massive gains in production of Oil sands. This has since fallen off for several reasons - mostly, it's tragically expensive. And it's very hard to refine crude, so it needs to go to the gulf coast. That are set up to refine heavy sour crude. It also needs to be cut along the way with light sweet crude - which, is what we primarily produce in the US. Some of our 'crude exports' are simply that - exporting light sweet crude to Canada, so they can actually export the tar they produce, so that we can, once again, refine it in the US.  Refinery complexity is a thing. Light sweet crude is good at making fuels but not always good at making other things. Such as asphalt, plastics, lubricants, chemicals, etc.  That is why the refinery complexity index is a thing.  If we simply only refined our crude - we would make less variations of products, which would drive the cost up of those products we can no longer produce.   So it's better to maintain some imports - particularly from the countries I mentioned.  We do not really import ME crude much anymore, because it's too expensive (Shipping) and because it's extremely similar to what we produce in a lot of ways - so lack of need.  

The KXL also had 4 years to build ~18 miles of pipeline. They didn't do it. Why didn't they do it? Because it wasn't needed. It needed approximately ~900k BPD throughput to become financially viable. It was going to have a max capacity of ~1.2M BPD capacity.  When initially proposed, it had ~700k BDP commitment to capacity. The rest could be spot toll throughput to get closer to it's maximum capacity.  With expansions of other lines - Enbridge, trans mountain, etc.  The commitment capacity fell from 700k BPD, to >300k BPD.  It was no longer financially viable to construct this line. On top of that, Alberta's production levels plateaued due to cost of production and the fall off of oil prices at the time. Once oil settled in at >$100/bbl - it was no longer going to be built. So it became a political football. Which, people are still tossing around to this day. So again, much like the SPR, stop.  It's not needed, it would be a financial hole for someone to build even if it WAS approved, that would never make money.

Our oil production:

Yes, the federal government royalties on public grounds doubled under Biden. Yes, Permitting time has taken longer. But only about 25% of our production happens on federal land. The rest happens in private land. Meaning, shit owned by you and I.    Yes, shitheads like NY and CA are taking rights from Land owners and just flat out banning drilling from happening.  Yes, Biden is a shithead for delaying permitting on LNG export facilities.    HOWEVER.   The oil industry is very resilient.  Thus, why if you compare the inflation of a dollar, to oil - Oil prices are below inflation. Significantly.   Our oil production in the US can probably cap out around 15M BPD - but there's no real demand for that right now.  Our rig count could currently double, if we wanted to.  Right now though, the US is the Swing supplier for the globe.  We're the only country that can fairly easily increase production and decrease production by millions of barrels. SA, the UAE, etc. Ended large investment projects because of global competition.  Where it would take SA 5 years and billions of dollars to increase their max capacity from ~12m BPD, to 13m BPD, we went from ~10.5m BPD, to 13m BPD in about a year.  Just, easier for us.  That's a huge advantage. There is also huge capacity coming online in South American countries and other non-OPEC countries that is further putting pressure on OPEC countries.  See BP's purchase of Hess.  

So how do these OPEC+ Countries react? Quotas. They're a cartel. Simply put, they reduce output - as they're national controlled oil companies. They just say "Stop producing more oil."  And... they do. By knocking global production off line, global prices go up. Pretty easy. As I said, Russia has fallen off about ~1.5M BPD, this I said was going to happen about 2 years ago. It's speculated to continue to decrease a bit more? We shall see. I don't think it will get into the 8m BPD reduction, but, I can see it falling off a bit more.  SA and other OPEC countries have cut millions of barrels a day of capacity to the global markets. Why? To keep prices high.

High margins? Or high volume?

It's a business. Currently OPEC+ is going with higher margins, lower volumes. It swings here or there.  So to continue this spike in prices - so we don't have a 2010-2012 super cycle - the US oil production has stepped up to the plate as the swing producer, formally replacing SA as the primary swing producer in the world.






The oil market goes up and goes down. Right now we're on an upward swing.  But, currently, it's a good thing for the US Economy.  The down side is, how much debt we have. But I don't have enough time to get into that whole shitshow of a conversation.



Anymore questions?


Edit:

SA-RU Oil war / Covid is another topic.  But I need to go home.

GD can’t scream “10% for the big guy” when people like you ejaculate facts on their faces like that.

Thread over.

Well said

Yea but we’re not even at peak, imagine if we were peak, lower domestic prices and supply our allies and have their dollars flow here vs Iran and Russia.

Yet we are not replenishing the stratigic petroleum reserves

Figured it was, lol...



...just read up on the NCI ever-so quickly. Sounds like a way to rate the ability of a refinery to process oil at all (many) levels of the process & whether its worth investing in them if they are low number-of-process facilities.

Did the USofA not produce (refine) any complex stuff (high NCI) such as lubes & aromatics (whatever those are) but foreigners did?

Wouldn't be if I had access to it ...

I figured out a couple of oil/gas threads back that it is not worth my keystrokes to reply to any other posts in these threads.

I’ll just sit back here in my corner with my popcorn.

You are assuming that they will read it or research anything about oil production and refining themselves.  He has pretty much said all of that before yet here we are.

I work in “Production Enhancement”  for one of the largest oil field services companies in the world in the Permian Basin. Over the last couple years, technology and efficiency has grown leaps and bounds for shale oil and gas. Especially in the electric frac fleet. With the onset or simul, trimul, quad frac soon, and continuous pumping, petroleum recovery has gone up and cost has gone down. It’s a game of efficiency. North American Land operations lead the world in this.

Same guys who screamed that the spotted owl was responsible for killing the US logging industry.... when in reality, it was mainly due to the cheap Canadian lumber.

We have some of the most complex refineries in the world.  We produce a ton of base stocks. Aeromatics are your “tanes” - butane, propane, solvents, etc.

There’s a report every year done by the O&G journal. But runs $2000 or so to get a copy.  I don’t have one floating around to scan either.

More complex refineries are (usually) more productive, thus more profitable.

You best keep reading...

10-4. Appreciate your insights & knowledge.

Seems a fickle business, oil is. Based on a previous post of yours, its extremely expensive to build & operate a refinery. Its also extremely expensive to suck the stuff out of the ground...



...and we all wonder why petrol prices at the pump are so much. I'll take a higher cost (for domestic) as long as it comes with more security (availability and supply chain stuff) vs foreign products

Opec cut production, Russia must sell on the black market, prices rose. The only way for the US to maintain high levels of production is for the price of oil to remain relatively high. The Saudis can pump it out of the ground for less than 10 USD per bbl. US producers need at least 45 USD per bbl to even break even.  It's the market, not the politicians. If we have a global recession and oil plummets. The US producers are going to get hammered, again.

SA’s “break even” point is actually in the mid ~$80/bbl. Because they fund their country off it.  It moves depending on their yearly budget. And their volume.  So again the volume vs price argument.  The higher the price, the lower the volume they need to ship, to meet their annual budget needs.


Their production cost has been rising. Because they have to inject so much sea water to keep pressures up. It’s probably now <$25 / bbl.  Back over a decade ago it was north of $16.

I still think it's dumb we're producing shale oil so fast we have to flare gas when there's still cheaper conventional oil available.

I get it keeps prices a little lower, good for Biden, but still.

Foxtrot might change my mind, I dunno.

Speculation and war jitters.

I agree, flaring is wasteful. But, pipelines to get it to market are expensive.

It’s a catch 22 when NG is >$2. Just no money in it currently.

Maybe as we (hopefully) expand LNG exports and build more NG power plants.

Also Oil is a globally traded commodity. So it doesn't matter if the USA is the safest place in the world. The rest of the world's situation is priced into the oil market, that we abide by.

To expand on my previous post... the Houthis shutting down the Suez and Panama Canal greatly reducing traffic because of record low water levels.

War in Ukraine.....

so many factors

It's just straight up inflation IMO.

I was happy to find $3 diesel for the decade before Covid.

Diesel is $3.59 now. So 20% higher.

What isn't 20% higher than in 2019?

So they pump ocean deep into the earth to 'bubble up' the oil? Do they do that also so that Dubai doesn't just sink into the earth...

Where is this cheaper conventional oil that can replace what shale is doing?  Is there no gas in that formation?  Gas and oil come hand in hand out this way for the most part so if you drill for oil the gas has to go somewhere.  Some is used in the gas lift systems to get the oil out of the ground, a lot gets sold and sent down pipelines but there is no place for ALL of it to go at this point and the price sucks.

He’s trying to mitigate oil price spikes for the election.

Houses, cars, and food are 50% more and you expect gas prices to be the same?

@FoxTrot08

We have two aromatics departments.  An Aromatics West and an Aromatics East.

East has 8 units:
1.  A catalytic reformer
2.  Hydrosulferization unit 1 (light)
3.  Hydrosulferization unit 2 (heavy)
4.  Distillate hydrotreater
5.  Szorb unit (removes sulfur from the FCC gasoline)
6.  Heavy cat naphtha hydrotreater
7.  Cat naphtha splitter
8.  Hydro-cracker flasher

West:

1.  Catalytic reformer
2.  Steam methane reformer
3.  Gasoline hydrotreater
4.  Hydro cracker unit
5.  Ultra low sulfur diesel
6.  Hydrogen plant 1
7.  Hydrogen plant 2

There have been a few posts in this thread commenting on how pricey it is to run a refinery.

The department I was in at the end of 2017 consisted primarily of a crude distillation unit and a delayed coker unit.  The crude unit had a fire.  It provided the feedstock to the DCU.  Both units were down for a month.  The crude unit might  have been processing 60,000 barrels of raw crude per day.  The DCU might have been taking in about 18,000 barrels of “pitch” per day.  

So at the end of 2018, the #3 guy in the refinery came to talk to us with his spreadsheet.  He said for the month we were down it was a “lost profit opportunity”  of $6,000,000 .  It doesn’t take a rocket surgeon to figure out that’s an LPO of $200,000 per day.

Profit!

After all the miscellaneous expenses like wages/salary and the electrical bill has been taken out.

Wherever they're producing conventionally?

I'm saying we don't have to exploit shale so fast that there's nowhere for all the gas to go except to flare it.

It's an election year.

They know high gas prices will kill them in the polls.