The US is currently a net oil exporter, and has been for a few years.

Now of course that's not the whole picture, but if push came to shove, the US could achieve energy independence (at least technologically, if not poitically).

True, the US could supply all of its energy needs through great effort and by making its population pay much higher energy prices. In contrast, if a country were to build around e.g. solar, and then all countries that made the panels embargoed them, the price of electricity would merely stop falling.

Why would it necessarily be more expensive?

The oil can be sold today profitably at today’s market rate.

If there stopped being from the outside competition for the oil, wouldn’t that roughly balance out stopping the supply of oil from the outside?

> If there stopped being from the outside competition for the oil, wouldn’t that roughly balance out stopping the supply of oil from the outside?

In the short run, yes. In the long run you’d fuck up the economies of scale and profit incentives.

I think whether the economies of scale and profit incentives get fucked up depends on the size of the before and after markets we are talking about.

For these to collapse, I believe we would need the international market for US oil specifically to be substantially larger than the entire domestic market for any oil. Is that true?

> we would need the international market for US oil specifically to be substantially larger than the entire domestic market for any oil

You just need U.S. producers to be insulated from international competition.

Czechia is quite nuclear-friendly and yet we ran into a problem with nuclear fuel supply; you don't feed raw uranium into the reactor, you need specially designed fuel rods. Switching from Russian to American ones for our nuclear power plants took several years. We just finished doing so, and now there is a conflict between the US and the rest of the world as well. Lovely.

All solvable, all better than just running out of oil, but I wouldn't call the situation "independence", just "having a better buffer".

Didn't framatome started producing vver fuel elements?