Gas prices are high in the US because our own oil companies are selling US oil on the open market instead

[wiggs]

of keeping it here. Correct?

I realize oil/gas is fungible...but because of war oil the plentiful oil from the US is being sold to the highest bidders elsewhere?. We are an exporting country, is my understanding and theoretically if we kept the oil and gas we produce our gas prices would be stable? Is there an emergency rule that would prohibit US oil from being sold outside the US?

The war is making US oil companies wealthy?

[newdeal2]

1. It still has to be refined

We do not have the refining capacity for our own type of oil. We get cheaper oil from Canada etc. and refine that instead.

[kysrsoze]

2. Why has no one pointed out it takes weeks for oil to get through

the gasoline production and distribution system? Gas went up immediately. This happens over and over. We’re being scammed.

[Deuxcents]

3. Yes. I call it gouging. Time to cut off their annual government subsidies..which btw is in the billions of $$

[EX500rider]

4. Because most petroleum sellers these days go by replacement cost

If you have a 10,000 gallon fuel tank at your gas station and you sell 500 gallons they charge what it's going to cost them to replace that 500 gallons with the current price of fuel.
That same theory goes all the way up the chain to the oil wells

[AZJonnie]

5. We had that rule, actually for like 35 years

When we started fracking heavily, under Obama, and as another poster mentioned, began to have a glut of a type of oil (sweet, light) that we as a country have insufficient domestic refining capacity to process (although it can be blended to be processed in our existing refineries, it's not economically optimal), that long time rule against crude exports was rescinded. There's been a lot of 'trading' since then, not just sales.

But the bottom line is, yeah, although we export a lot of crude, we also still IMPORT a lot, because our refineries are not well suited for the fracked oil, because it's different from the oil we FIRST extracted, from like 1910-2010. Those sources are running much lower now, so we supplement our own supply with imports of the type of crude our existing refineries support. Other countries do otoh have facilities that can process sweet, light, like China, India, and the Netherlands, to name a few, so we sell to them to get money to buy from others.

So unfortunately it's not just a matter for forcing the US oil onto the US market. We can't refine ENOUGH of our own US oil to supply the US daily needs, using the refineries we have. We might be a 'net exporter' by a few million barrels a day, but we cannot just stop importing and switch to using the fracked oil we now export instead.

I'll be honest I've learned a lot of this over the past few days by researching the matter and am FAR from an expert, but this is my current understanding. I hope someone will correct me if I'm expressing this incorrectly

[wiggs]

6. Thx! nt

[Boo1]

7. You could

And then those oil companies d s would probably just stop pumping oil. Why would they bother with the costs just to sell it cheaper?

[wiggs]

8. They would charge what is supported in the US, not what they could charge desperate countries whose

oil supply has been cut off or diminished.

[Boo1]

9. Would they?

Why?

If we cut off exports, other countries would stop exporting to us. US producers could just cut production and pump prices up to match what they would get internationally.

What are you going to do? Send in the army to take them over?