Just in case there was any doubt about what this war was about.
I’ll note that Chevron’s refineries in California have exactly the right equipment to process Venezuelan crude (it’s heavy) and have been under threat of shutting down due to depletion of oil fields in California.
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That’s true, but each new oil discovery is likely to be more expensive to extract than the last, and because it takes energy to extract oil, we have to consider the energy return on investment (EROI) of all future oil extraction. Once we get to the point where it requires a barrel of oil equivalent of energy to extract a barrel of oil out of the ground, the EROI drops to 1:1 and there’s no profit to be made, from an energy standpoint, regardless of price. Oil discovery in the US has decreased from an EROI of 1000:1 in 1919 to about 5:1 in the 2010s.
No matter how you look at it, the world has just got to stop using oil wherever physically possible.