White House officials are bracing for oil prices to surge past the $150-a-barrel mark as the Iran war stretches into its second month and the Strait of Hormuz remains largely closed, according to a new report.
In recent weeks, the average cost of a barrel of crude has hovered around $100, a figure that the Trump administration now sees as the new “baseline,” though a potential spike to $200 hasn’t been ruled out, a source familiar with the matter told Politico.
As a result, officials have entered “all hands on deck” mode, urgently evaluating options to tame soaring oil prices — which pushed gas above $4 a gallon this week and risks inflating costs across the broader economy.
Trump could ban US oil export. That would bring the price of gas down here.
He won’t do that.
I’m doubtful of that. Oil is a globalized commodity, and international prices will still affect local sales, even if none of our oil actually comes through the strait of Hormuz.
I’m convinced the strait being closed is the whole point of this mess. It’s just an excuse to charge more despite local production costs not changing. If export were banned, I think they’d just lower production to keep their margins high.
The point is that banning the export of US oil would cause oil to stop being a globalized commodity (in the US.) US production and US consumption have not changed since the Iran war started. But US prices are up since US production is being shipped to places where their supply from Hormuz is cut off.
Other responder said that US refining can’t refine US oil, which would be extremely odd and I hadn’t heard that before but if true would indeed destroy my logic here.
The oil refineries we have in the US attention equipped to handle the type of oil we can actually produce here. We export just about all of our oil, and just about all of our oil product are refined from foreign oil.
If we didn’t export US oil, we wouldn’t be able to do much with it.
I’m nowhere near an expert, but that’s solely a cost issue. We certainly have the tech and the oil companies would be happy to retool with taxpayer dollars. What’s another trillion or three between friends?
It’s not just cost, but also time. This issue is quite a pressing concern, I am no expert but from what I’ve read they can’t quickly retool for a different type of oil, it would be a longer term kind of thing, not fast enough for the current crisis