American oil exports on the rise

WASHINGTON, July 12, 2017 - While the price is right and U.S. crude is flowing, the world is buying. The Wall Street Journal reported that China was importing 100,000 barrels of American oil daily. The New York Times reports that as of April, the port of Corpus Christi, Texas, alone was shipping out 384,000 barrels a day. Much of the oil is going to China, which used to buy mostly from Saudi Arabia. “If there’s opportunity to buy (oil) from somewhere else, we should. The pre-condition is that it must be economical,” said Lin Boqiang, an energy expert at Xiamen University and Beijing oil policy adviser. The export boom comes just 18 months after the Commerce Department lifted a decades-old oil export ban that began in 1977 in response to the oil crisis. It severely limited the types of oil the U.S. could ship out, resulting in only 43.8 million barrels exported in 2013. The Obama administration opened up exports to Mexico in June 2015. Near the close of that same year, Congress lifted the ban entirely.