The US Global Sour Crude Game

Why does the United States produce 1 million barrels of oil per day but sell almost all of it unrefined to other countries while at the same time importing 1 million barrels of oil from Canada, Venezuela and the Middle East? And why did Trump drop tariffs on Canadian oil but nothing else Canadian? In the latter case because someone told Trump that most of our oil refineries are set up to only refine heavy sour crude oil and they can't easily be reconfigured to refine light sweet crude, which is mostly what we produce.

The United States has some heavy sour crude in the Southwest but we mostly produce just light sweet crude oil which can only be refined into different fuels, whereas heavy sour crude has more sulfur compounds and other impurities, and when those impurities are refined out of the oil they turn into base feedstock chemicals and acids that are used to produce plastics and an enormous amount of chemicals for the manufacturing industry that was created for the United States military during World War II.

After World War II the American Oligarchs shifted chemical and plastics manufacturing from the sour crude feedstocks to Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan, using $4 billion in U.S. aid and Chase loans from 1945 to 1970 to build the factories. And ever since we have been buying oil from Saudi Arabia, OPEC, Canada, and anyone else with heavy sour crude, shipping it to the United States, refining it, using the fuel here, shipping the barrels of base feedstock to the Pacific Rim, then shipping finished products or parts back to the United States. When China joined the WTO in 2001 the base feedstocks or secondary products like plastic pellets started being shipped into China, and then finished products and parts were shipped back to the United States.

This saved money for the American Oligarchs because they didn't have to pay union labor and eliminated environmental concerns because the factories that make products from base feedstocks are usually very polluting. As long as American corporations can exploit developing and conquered nations for their cheap labor and no environmental laws they will. In addition, US control over factories in Japan, South Korea and Taiwan gave us a foothold in the Pacific Rim as a check to both Soviet and Chinese communist expansion.

What has the US done to keep this system going? The United States maintains a global Navy presence that functions as anti-piracy to make sure ships and shipping lanes remain largely unmolested. The US also committed Operation Ajax in 1953 overthrowing the first democratically elected government of Iran and installing the Shah. And we will definitely turn a blind eye to any human rights abuses as long as our 2 million barrels of oil per day keeps flowing.

This US global sour crude game involves shipping a million barrels of oil into the United States every day, shipping another million barrels of oil that we produce out of the United States every day, as well as barrels of base feedstock to Asia, and then shipping finished goods back from China on container ships, and the US Navy makes sure all of the ships with our stuff get to where they are going. A million barrels may seem like a lot, but each Seuzmax tanker can carry around a million barrels of oil, so in simple terms, every day we export 1 Seuzmax full of light sweet crude and import 1 Suezmax full of heavy sour crude for refining.