Hi, I'm Denise, and this is your Civic Minute.
The United States produces more oil than any country on Earth.
It also imports over 6 million barrels a day.
Both of those things are true at the same time, and here's why.
The oil America drills is mostly light and sweet, low sulfur, easy to refine.
But about 70% of our refineries were built decades ago to process heavy sour crude.
The thick high sulfur oil from Canada, the Middle East, and Venezuela.
So we export our oil to refineries overseas that can use it, and we import the heavy crude
our own refineries we're designed for.
It sounds absurd, but retooling a single refinerie to switch crude types costs hundreds of millions
of dollars and takes years.
So instead, we trade.
That's why energy independence is misleading.
We have plenty of oil.
It's just not the right oil for our own refineries, and even if it were, the price is still
set on a world market.
Watch your civic minute.
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