A bill recently introduced in the U.S. Senate lifting the ban on American crude oil exports could bring in more than $21 billion a year in export revenue.
Lifting the ban could also cut into Russian exports and loosen the stranglehold Vladimir Putin currently has on much of Europe, according to the American Action Forum.
The United States enacted a ban on crude oil exports in 1975 in reaction to the OPEC-generated oil crisis, and the U.S. remains the only country in the world that does not allow crude oil exports.
“If the crude oil export ban was lifted tomorrow, U.S. supplies headed to domestic refineries could be rerouted and placed on ships almost immediately to be exported overseas,” the Forum observed.
“This quick reaction would have immediate consequences for the Russian crude market,” which supplies much of Europe with its crude needs.
Germany is the largest European importer of Russian oil — 690,000 barrels a day in 2012. The Netherlands imported 550,000 barrels a day, Poland 480,000, and Belarus 415,000.
Other European nations importing Russian oil include Finland, Sweden, Lithuania, Italy, France, Spain, Bulgaria, Hungary, and the U.K.
According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA), in 2013 Russian energy exports accounted for nearly 70 percent of all Russian exports.
With imports of U.S. oil, “a country like Poland, which gets 96 percent of its oil imports from Russia, can narrow the margins on those imports, not entirely but enough to loosen the stranglehold that is currently in place,” the Forum stated.
The Forum estimated that the U.S. has the capacity to export between 500,000 and 1 million barrels of crude oil per day.
At the low end, using $58.17 as the price of a barrel, exports would bring in — and Russia could lose — $10.7 billion a year. At the high end, they would bring in more than $21 billion in gross revenue.
Increased U.S. oil production has already reduced the need for imports of foreign oil. From the first quarter of 2014 to the first quarter of this year, U.S. Gulf Coast imports of medium crude oil from Saudi Arabia decreased by 52 percent, according to the EIA, while imports of medium crude from Kuwait decreased by 46 percent over that period.
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