It's unlikely an unfinished pipeline for export purposes had a significant impact on current gasoline prices.
https://apnews.com/article/fact-checking-895299166310
"Experts tell The Associated Press that the Keystone XL pipeline cancellation isn’t affecting what’s happening in the oil market today. It was never operational when it was shut down, and was not slated to go into service until 2023, according to a press release from TC Energy, the company constructing the project."
"Even if the Keystone XL pipeline had been completed, the amount of oil it was designed to transport would have been a drop in the bucket for U.S. demand, experts noted. The U.S. used nearly 20 million barrels of oil a day last year, while global consumption of oil was near 100 million barrels. The pipeline would have contributed less than 1% to the world supply of oil, according to AP reporting."
https://wtop.com/national/2021/10/covid-19-drives-gas-oil-pr...
The returning to normal(ish) phase - in late 2020, early 2021 - increased it.
We're still dealing with supply chain issues, and will for a while. The idea that you can turn the economy down 30% and back up 30% in less than a year with no lasting effects is silly.
> When this thread started the war in Ukraine was the issue.
Yes. Starting from an already-disrupted screwed-up economic baseline certainly doesn't help.
Simply put we were net oil exporters under Trump, all of the sudden we are back to begging the Saudis. Given the environmental retoric of this administration it isn't unreasonable to conclude that they had a hand in that.
Please peddle your disinformation elsewhere.
Begging the Saudis under Biden: https://www.npr.org/2022/06/25/1107628743/biden-will-visit-s...
We export light sweet crude.
We don't have the refineries set up to refine that type of oil.
We import sour crude that the refineries set up to process more efficiently in the 90s (before fracking).
Saudi oil is the sour type - and so we import that and the price of Saudi oil has the biggest impact on US gas prices.
To change this around, oil companies in the US need to retool their refineries to the light sweet type that is produced domestically.
Their actions do have effects and sometimes a corrupt group of lifetime government grifters make bad decisions that have bad effects. The Orwellian framing is that nothing these people do could ever be wrong.
Open your eyes. The sanctions have done nothing to stop Russia, have driven up the cost of fuel (which benefits them, an energy exporter), and have dramatically heightened geopolitical tensions all over the world. We went from a situation where Russia was going to end up with a land bridge to Crimea, to a situation where Russia is likely going to end up controlling all of Ukraine, is substantially richer, and has driven a wedge between the US and India.
> Open your eyes.
Use your eyes to see how the Russian offensive is going.
> Biden and other world government officials placed massive sanctions on Russia exports of oil.
China, India, Africa, etc. are happily buying it up. Oil's a fungible commodity.
(We already imported basically no oil directly from Russia pre-war, already, but uncertainty of any global scale is bad for prices. Find the tiny little Russia line on https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/6d/US_oil_p...)
Urals crude is trading $20-$30 below Brent, and China and India have Russia over a barrel when negotiating prices. https://www.neste.com/investors/market-data/urals-brent-pric...
The war has not been going well for Russia at all, stagnant at best https://understandingwar.org/project/ukraine-project
> is substantially richer
Russia has been putting out very cherry-picked data on their economy, which Western journalists have been taking at face value. They've been unable to make more PGMs, and their civilian sector is getting savaged.
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4167193
Perun's Youtube channel has been a great deep-dive source into the war economy in general. If you're at all interested in how governments acquire arms, he's an indispensable watch. TL;DW: The time for Russia to win the war was February, now it's a matter of how many people and how much wrecked steel and how much of Ukraine he wants to make into a wasteland before he says uncle.
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCC3ehuUksTyQ7bbjGntmx3Q
EDIT: Because I can't reply, Good Times Bad Times is good too. They're a bit more high-level and wider scope than Perun, and I'd recommend them as well.
You watch the Good Times Bad Times channel too by any chance?
Not gonna happen. They might keep what they grabbed, especially if the West is going to continue dragging their feet and giving Ukrainians aid at the current "attrition war" rates, but they are at the peak of what they could achieve, at least at this round. The question now is - would they be able to keep it, not whether they can grab more.
Imagine you're a company which builds refining and extraction infrastructure. The government wants you to build more capacity to bring down the cost fuel, but 18 months ago. you watched them just straight up cancel a project which was already half finished.
Would you go for this? I wouldn't.
And you have a bunch of land lease contracts which allow you to extract oil. Without these contracts your business will collapse. The government has said that they won't give you any more until you use the ones you have. But again: they've spent the last 18 months cancelling projects, and talking about how we need to make a transition away from your business.
Do you trust that once you use up the remaining leases you have, that they're really going to give you more? I wouldn't trust that.