The real reason we sell oil outside the US is quite simple- it takes money to stockpile it and you make zero dollars when it is just sitting there. If you have a lot of producing oil wells there becomes nowhere to put it. I am in the tech biz and spent several days in Oklahoma with one of the main players in oil drilling. He taught me so much in that short time I felt totally stupid! He showed me a line of tank cars on a railroad track filled with oil. He said they are sitting there because the producers are finding so much oil it is faster than the market can absorb it.
When you put up an oil rig you need to make money ASAP since your upfront costs are huge. And factoring in poorly performing wells (you never know until you drill), you end up with a lot of expenses. They are paid from oil sales revenues of course. So once you hit a high production well you need to sell everything that comes out of it 24/7/ You don't turn off a valve and wait for customers to come. In fact capping off a well, even temporarily, is outrageously expensive.
With the advent of lateral drilling (that is the reason for the boom in oil production, along with oil shale- not fracking as the moronic media seems to think) more previously unrecoverable oil is now in play. A lot of drillers have struck pay dirt and the market is flooded with crude. So what do you do with it? Sell it of course.
Until 2015, it was illegal to export oil drilled in the USA. This was because a law was signed in 1975 during the oil crisis. The idea was to keep all domestic oil in the USA. So what happened? Oil prices skyrocketed and production actually went down. The reason production went down was because of a preference given to certain oil producers that pushed the small guys out of the market.Typical of anything the US Congress comes up with
So when the ban was lifted, it suddenly became an open market again. Take a drive through west Texas if you want to see a boom going on... And the beneficiary of this is the US consumer.
