• Ellia Plissken@lemm.ee
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    17 days ago

    correct me if I’m wrong, but the United States doesn’t even have oil refineries that are capable of making gasoline out of American oil? like we need the type of oil that the middle East has, so we’re constantly trading oil back and forth even though we have plenty of it

    I think I’ve heard this is true. something about politicians wanting to look environmentalist and therefore preventing the building of any more refineries

    • The lack of investment in the types of oil refineries to refine US oil domestically isn’t as much for optics purposes. But that relative to the amount of investment required to build new refineries to compete with the current foreign ones isn’t a good return on investment relative to the up front cost and the existing profits of the current arrangement.

      • Ellia Plissken@lemm.ee
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        17 days ago

        the government should at least subsidize a couple so in the event of an apocalypse we can make our own gasoline.

        • MonkeyBusiness@sh.itjust.works
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          14 days ago

          This sounds like a good idea. I wonder why it hasn’t happened. Maybe lobbyists have prevented politicians from doing so so that the USA is dependent on countries with appropriate refineries, which protects the income and security of the other country using the USA’s GDP and military.

    • fox [comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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      17 days ago

      No, there’s a significant amount of oil infrastructure locally. They’ve even got a colonialist extension with Canada: crude oil crosses over to be refined and sold back to Canada

      • No, it is true. It is not the quantity of oil infrastructure, but the grades and types they are. The US crude is mostly light sweet crude after the shift to oil shale. The refinery infrastructure was originally built for heavy crude with high sulfur content. Thus the US imports the type of oil our refineries were built to handle, and exports the portion of the oil that is domestically produced, but the wrong type.