• jqubed@lemmy.worldEnglish
    17 days

    I’ve never really understood, but also never really looked into, why North America imports oil when it also exports oil.

    • ggtdbz@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
      17 days

      The ultra ultra short version is that there are different types of (crude) oil. Different places have different types.

      • jqubed@lemmy.worldEnglish
        17 days

        And some of those different types I’m guessing are better for different purposes, probably purposes other than simple automobile fuel?

        • ggtdbz@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
          17 days

          Different types make different amounts of similar stuff. Gasoline is one product (it’s actually a combination of oil derivatives, not simple at all as it turns out). If you’ve ever heard “sweet crude” that’s a specific thing, “shale oil” from fracking is another, etc. It’s theoretically possible for an oil producing country to still need to import “ingredients” it still needs to produce gasoline.

          Different types of oil also need different factories to be processed. Off the top of my head I don’t know the specifics but I think the US has a lot of facilities to process types of oil that it doesn’t make domestically.

          This is probably not all perfectly true, I think this stuff is disgusting, but more or less this is it.