The war over Iran has turned into an energy crisis for many nations, and the United States is helping them by selling a record amount of oil over the past few weeks, but contrary to what most people think, there is a limit to how much oil America can sell.
Why? Because the US doesn't have so much oil sitting around that it can just provide all the oil other nations need.
Texas-based geologist and petroleum analyst Art Berman will tell you: The U.S. is not a net oil exporter -- the U.S. is a net oil importer.
Seriously. It's all in the details, and most people don't understand the "fine print," so to speak.
"Is the U.S. self-sufficient when it comes to oil?" Berman asks, and the answer is "Absolutely not. That's a complete deceptive statement, so why is it deceptive?
"Well, there are a lot of things that get called "oil" such as natural gas liquids, which of course doesn't even come from oil, it comes from natural gas."
But once processed into liquid form, natural gas can be used somewhat like oil, and it is often lumped together with oil when measuring the output of nations, he adds.
"Two-and-a-half-million barrels per day that is exported from the U.S. is basically natural gas liquids," Berman says, but it's not really oil. He calls lumping them all together but calling it oil a form of "fraud."
"But here's the key. The U.S. exports on average about 4 million barrels per days of crude oil, strictly crude oil and we import about 6-and-a-half million barrels per day. So right there, we're a net importer of about 2-and-a-half-million barrels per day.
"So where do we get this idea that we're a net exporter? Well, that's because we add in all this other stuff," Berman notes.
"The problem is U.S. refineries need a mix of light oil and heavy oil and the United States doesn't have the perfectly correct oil so we blend it. And much of that we import."
It has to be this way because of the geology of oil formations and their distribution around the world, but most of all it's the way U.S. refineries are built, requiring the kind of oil that must be imported.
But this is all easily misunderstood.
"People come out with a statement saying things like 'We don't need other people's oil' in the U.S. but that's just not true."
And Art Berman isn't the only one who'll correct you if you say the US is a net oil exporter. Plenty of other oil analysts will back him up and his extensive custom charts, graphs, detailed X posts and white papers.
For most of us, though, it's 'Oil, petroleum, liquid gas. What's the difference?"
A lot, as you can see.