RM: U.S. is not currently “reliant on Russian oil”, nor are we likely to be in the forseeable future. We currently do not import a single barrel of Russian oil and the last Russian LNG tanker left the Boston harbor terminal 19 months ago. Instead of calling other posters “idiots”, please review the EIA data for the past several years. U.S. oil/gas production (primarily Marcellus shale) declined sharply beginning in mid-2020 as a result of declining demand from Covid-related shutdowns. Prior over-investment had pushed down prices to a point where the major E&P companies were not willing to invest in new production until prices increased. With declining cap-X costs, their profits the past two years have hit all-time highs and they are not anxious to revert to pre-Covid margins. Deptartment of Interior data (on their website) show that the E&P companies are sitting on litterally tens of millions of acres of leases where they could start drilling tomorrow if they wished. The Keystone pipeline would have imported crude from the Alberta tar sands NOT U.S. production. The global market in petroleum and refined products is fungible. Even if we stopped buying Russian oil, which we currently don’t, someone else would and we would simply displace those purchases with other supplies from the North Sea and Middle East.
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