Quote:
Originally Posted by Battlebasset
Prices were quite low from 2017 to 2020, so I would say yes. We had OPEC in a stranglehold. Every time they tried to raise prices, our producers would undercut them.
Great position to be in. Master of your own fate. Here's a WSJ article from 2020 with more details. You can view for free with your library card and the Sumter County Library website log-in. And no, I don't mean this to be political. Just an illustration of how it can be done.
Russia Takes Aim at U.S. Shale Oil Producers - WSJ |
I suspect you are looking at data with a preconceived notion of the truth. See the chart below showing crude oil prices since 2014
//www.macrotrends.net/2516/wti-crude-oil-prices-10-year-daily-chart
There was absolutely nothing special about 2017 to 2020 other than a price crash when the world demand collapsed from Covid. There was also a crash in world
oil prices in the last quarter of 2017 and it had nothing to do with our producers strangling OPEC. The cost then shot up in the first quarter of 2018 wiping out the drop that happened. Again our production did not change at all from its previous trend.
It is all world economic demand and speculators. The US gov't unlike OPEC nations does not regulate how much oil we produce nor how much we ship overseas. We would be oil independent if you want to nationalize the oil industry and legislate that all oil pumped from US land remain here.
US oil companies have made huge profits as oil prices rose after the Covid shutdown ended and the Putin war against Ukraine disrupted Russian oil availability to Europe, and yes even to the USA. The price of US produced oil went up and US produced oil was sold on the worldwide market at the new increasing prices. So Chevron and Exxon etc all made windfall profits, not because of US government policies but because they wanted to boost their profits and
buy back their own stock which benefits the stockholders and the CEOs pay. They didn't use those profits to invest in their workers or their infrastructure. Exxon alone is using the money it gained from gouging us to the tune of a 50 billion dollar buyback. $50,000,000,000.00
The crude price per barrel was 53.06 on Jan 20 2017
It was 76.41 on Oct 3 2018 which was a 44% increase in just 21 months. Did that large increase happen because our producers strangled OPEC? Obviously not
then the market crashed
It was 44.81 on Dec 27 2018 but then it jumped again
It was 63.27 on Jan 6 2020 then Covid hit
This is not oil market stability this is simply typical of the variations in a highly volatile world commodity which moves in part on real world events and partly on speculators. Remember Eddie Murphy in Trading Places
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uI4fVgVVpiw