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 State...