Are you sure the majority of it would be for export?
A big driver of exports is simply the fact that lots of places don't have refinery capacity. People in such places are willing to pay more than people in the U.S., with its relative abundance of refineries.
The rest of the 'not consuming our own content' is just a logistics thing, the cheapest oil is generally used, not the oil that crosses the least borders.
>>>> A big driver of exports is simply the fact that lots of places don't have refinery capacity.
I've been harping on this for years. You can produce billions of gallons of oil, but if you can't refine it, it's a loss leader and a big reason why our gas continues to hover around $4.
If we owned the whole cycle from drilling, production, refinement and consumption, it would be huge. Cutting out the refining middle man would save us billions and dramatically reduce the price per gallon. It's just simple supply and demand.
The last refinery was built in 2008. Before that, in 1998. The majority of refineries were built in the 1970's - go figure, when oil was suddenly abundant and post OPEC embargo, very, very cheap.
For instance, Iran, one of the largest oil producing countries in the world, has to import refined gasoline, diesel, &c., because they lack refinery capacity. This in turn leads to enormous expenditures on subsidies to keep consumers and businesses running. One of the drivers for their nuclear program (setting aside the geopolitics of the bomb) is to reduce the cost of domestic energy production.
The U.S. consumes 8 or 9 million barrels of gasoline per day and imports a net of about 300,000 a day. So there is quite some domestic refinery production there.
Also, what's cheaper than using a currency which you have control over (read: ability to inflate; if one is in the camp that the conglomerate of national/international banks that own shares in the Federal Reserve act in unitarity with the USG) compared to most other countries, to import natural resources? One could call it free (if one doesn't factor the human beings on the other side of the equation...) Sure it can't last forever... but individuals don't last forever either.
A big driver of exports is simply the fact that lots of places don't have refinery capacity. People in such places are willing to pay more than people in the U.S., with its relative abundance of refineries.
The rest of the 'not consuming our own content' is just a logistics thing, the cheapest oil is generally used, not the oil that crosses the least borders.