[gumby]

> Some good news for you then: the US no longer needs a navy to ensure a steady stream of oil. The combination of the US and Canada has been producing all the oil the combination needs for a year or 2 now.

There's more to it than that.

first, oil is a commodity product traded around the world, so, say, if Indonesian (offshore) oilfields go offline, china will simply buy from the saudis, which will drive up the price of Saudi oil and encourage US producers to export instead. Now rising price encourages local production, but most of it can't be switched on and off in a instant.

And in fact they already both import and export; for example tar sands "oil" from Canada is removed with a shovel, not a pipe. Refining it is very expensive (and energy demanding) so only gets mined when the price of oil is high enough to justify it. Currently the US exports about as much oil as it imports.

Lots of great stats on this topic from the Energy Information Administration (though some of the important statistics stopped being collected last year, alas). Here is the petroleum import & export page: https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/oil-and-petroleum-produc...

[hollerith]

What you write is relevant to the price of oil, which is a tangent from what we were talking about, namely, ensuring a supply of oil in chaotic circumstances, e.g., closure of the Strait of Hormuz, which is itself a tangent from the original topic of Amtrak versus highways (since as GGGP already pointed out, Amtrak runs on oil, too).

But OK, let's talk about price. There's probably a 100 years worth of 'tight' oil just in Texas that can be produced for the price oil currently sells for. In other words, the cost of fracking that oil has decreased a lot. (And that oil is easier to refine than the stuff that comes from Saudi Arabia.)