Some Much Needed Substance On The Russian Oil Debate
Now we are looking high and low for replacements in a lot of places with less than savory reputations, and some under U.S. sanctions currently. As I have explained in various places recently, oil companies need blending stock to improve the API gravity of the throughput from their refineries. As the BTU Analytics graph below shows, the major fracking basins that produce most of the ~9 mm BOPD that we rely upon, produce very little of this heavy oil. That’s just life.


What this means though is that we have to replace like for like in terms of API gravity oil, and once again therein lies the rub. Nations that the president is contacting to ease the strain on American motorists include: Venezuela, Saudi Arabia, and Iran. What is the likelihood of our "friends" in these far-flung places coming to our rescue?
California, namely the southern Central Valley is home to the lowest API "the dirtiest" crude oil in the world. My home town's oil reserves at an API of 13 for Kern River and Midway-Sunset are estimated at somewhere near 600-750 million barrels depending on where you source (Wikipedia, versus California DOE) and yet it is completely left out of this list. Why? Because the majority of those wells have been idled for the past 10-15 years due to low oil prices and and two of our three chief refineries shutting down. Russian crude meanwhile, sits near an API of 35 and is cited as the "heavy crude" needed for American refineries. So an honest person might say, if we're important 400-600,000 barrels of medium grade crude, why not un-idle any of the approximately 7,600 idle wells. https://www.latimes.com/projects/cal...-idle-cleanup/ makes the answer pretty clear: liability. Sitting at estimates costs pushing past 500 million dollars to cap and remediate the wells once they're official exhausted, no oil producer wants to inherit the liability from Chevron, Occidental, Elk Hills or a handful of others. You may hear Kevin McCarthy who was my representative blame Gavin Newsom for not approving drilling "new wells" and for good reason, large swaths of California have been left as wastelands. https://e360.yale.edu/assets/site/_1...mages_2000.jpg

"OMG OIL PROFITS ARE JUST GREEDY" isn't the half of it. The oil companies have billions of dollars available for remediation they will never do and access to oil they never intend on making available because doing so will hurt their profits.