Time to Take the Brakes Off the U.S. Energy Industry

Canada has announced a ban (mostly symbolic) on Russian petroleum imports. The United States has not, because we have hamstrung ourselves. In spite of being the world’s largest oil producer — by far — we continue to import enormous quantities of oil and other petroleum products. That isn’t a bad thing in and of itself, but it does limit some of our options — and, in this case, it does so unnecessarily and, indeed, destructively.

There are four things to know here.

First:

The big immediate issue with U.S. petroleum production is not how much crude we produce but what kind of crude we produce. Before the boom in domestic production — enabled by the modern extraction techniques colloquially known as “fracking” — the United States depended heavily on imports, largely but not exclusively from the Middle East, because we had no other practical choice. As a result of that situation, many U.S. oil refineries are optimized to handle the “heavy, sour” crude we import rather than the “light, sweet” crude we produce.