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“While opening LNG exports is a noble goal and one that we as a country are actively working towards, the fact is the infrastructure to undertake large scale overnight LNG exports does not currently exist,” Harold Hamm, the chairman and CEO of Continental Resources Inc, will tell lawmakers at a House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Committee hearing slated for 10 am/1400 GMT on Wednesday.

“If we want to have an overnight impact on today’s global events, we can immediately begin exporting crude oil, which does not have the same infrastructure constraints” as LNG, he will say, according to prepared remarks.

ROCKMAN wrote:So funny. Apparently Mr. Hamm follows the philosophy: never let a good crisis go to waste. So kind of him to offer the oil the US consumer uses to our cousins on the other side of the world. A very generous offer. I have an even better idea: let Mr Hamm swap some of his oil for some of the KSA oil we import. Then there would be a need to ship both loads of oil half way around the world. Such swaps have been done for decades to save those transport costs. This way Mr. Hamm can continue to sell his oil in the US...and continue getting the same price. And as an incentive he picks up a bit more of US market share by replacing the KSA oil. that way he can sell even more oil here...at our posted prices.

I can play this freaking game with Mr. Hamm all day long. To bad his audience in congress doesn't understand even the basics of oil marketing.

UrDrighten wrote:
If we have such a surplus of oil that we are looking for people to sell it to, perhaps we would be wise as a nation to cut back until production meets domestic demands.

What we have now is all we’re ever going to get.

But oil exports also have a different impact on the home front than LNG exports. While we currently have more gas than we need, we still import, on a net basis, about 7.3 million barrels a day, or just less than half of our daily consumption.

Any exports would have to be offset by additional imports, says Jeffrey Brown, an independent petroleum geologist who tracks import data. Embracing exports the way Hamm suggests would simply shift the burden of greater foreign oil dependency from Europe back to the U.S.

This is why the notion of energy independence is unrealistic. Midwest producers like Hamm talk about rising oil production as if we have a surplus, but we are a long way from domestic production levels that would reduce imports to zero. Even if we achieve those levels, we are unlikely to maintain them for long.

For consumers, the entire debate doesn’t matter much. Exporting crude probably would have little effect on gasoline prices because most refiners are already selling their products based on the Brent price for crude, which is higher than the price for West Texas Intermediate, the U.S. benchmark. The Brent, or world, price is currently about $6.50 a barrel higher than WTI.