What Happened To The Oil We Are Taking from Venezuela

[gab13by13]

I just saw a headline that claims the price of crude oil is going to drop because someone said the US is now a net exporter of crude oil. What happened to all of the oil from Venezuela?

Have to keep those prices of gasoline and diesel reasonable, I guess. The fossil fuel industry will take care of Krasnov.

[orthoclad]

1. We export domestic fossils, we stole

Venezuela's oil, and we had a strategic reserve. But we're still paying high at the pump because "it's a global market", whatever that means.

Yeah, they're global thieves.

[AZJonnie]

2. This is a one-week point-in-time measurement brought about by the USA simply EXPORTING way more

than it normally does. This was not result of a large production increase or the like. The US oil industry just HUGELY surged what they're selling to the rest of the world because the world prices were so good (for them, thanks the Straits closure of course).

Though it MAY slightly reduce the global cost of crude, this will NOT lower gas prices in the USA. If anything, it will lower prices ELSEWHERE, but not in the USA. Because normally this huge surge of exports they just sold off would've stayed here in the USA to be used by the handful of refineries that can handle WTI.

Sorry to shout but while what you read may be technically true, like I say, it's a one week data point, a huge outlier from the norm, and it isn't sustainable. Normally the USA imports about 20% more crude per day than we export. Caveat: the USA has been a net ENERGY exporter since 2020, but the topic here is crude, and the US generally imports about 5.5M (typically heavy/sour, which the majority of US refineries are best suited for) and exports about 4.5M (sweet light aka WTI oil, mostly from the frackers, which some other countries basically ONLY have refineries for, and they're desperate at this point). Hence, every prior week, we've been net crude IMPORTERS still, But last week, Europe and Asia outbid domestic refineries for "our" oil, and US producers raked in the dough.

Venezuela's oil is not especially relevant to this equation. Their oil industry remains in shambles, and they haven't bumped up production, and their oil is not our oil, though we do buy about 300K barrels a day (heavy sour) from them.

I asked AI what this all might do to domestic pump prices, and it said this:

The US becoming a net crude exporter under these specific circumstances is essentially the worst possible version of that milestone for American consumers. It's not happening because of abundance overflowing domestic needs — it's happening because a war closed a critical global chokepoint, export prices are sky-high, and domestic supply is being drawn down rapidly (inventories already dropped 6.2 million barrels in one week). Every one of those factors points straight at the pump