Leon Smith รีทวีตแล้ว
For all the MAGA-tards claiming the USA can export enough oil to make up for the closure of the Strait of Hormuz:
The United States is, without question, the world's largest oil producer -- 13.6 million barrels per day as of 2025, a record high driven largely by efficiency gains in the Permian Basin. Impressive. But the Strait of Hormuz carries 20 million barrels per day through a waterway just 21 miles wide at its narrowest point.
That is not a rounding error. That's a 6.4-million-barrel-per-day gap before we have even accounted for the fact that America itself consumes 20.4 million barrels per day.
Read that again. The U.S. produces less oil than it consumes.
Its exportable petroleum surplus sits at roughly 2 to 3 million barrels per day. (Nowhere near 20 million bpd.)
Replacing Hormuz flows would require the U.S. to somehow stop using its own oil entirely, then increase production by nearly 50% overnight.
That is not a plan. That is a fantasy dressed up as foreign policy confidence.
And before someone brings up "just drill more" -- the EIA is already projecting U.S. production to decline through 2027. The Permian Basin -- America's crown jewel of oil production at 6.6 million barrels per day -- has breakeven costs of $61 to $62 per barrel. Margins are thin. Rig counts are already falling. New wells take one to three years to come online at meaningful scale, and that assumes the infrastructure to export them even exists, which it largely does not.
The U.S. simply does not have the deepwater export terminal capacity to ship 20 million barrels per day to the rest of the world. Building that infrastructure would take years and hundreds of billions of dollars.
Then there is the reserve question. The U.S. holds approximately 83.7 billion barrels of proven oil reserves (not yet extracted) -- enough for roughly 11 years at current domestic consumption levels. If you start aggressively exporting to replace Hormuz volumes on top of that, you are not looking at a long-term solution. You are looking at accelerated depletion of proven reserves.
The countries that would suffer most from a Hormuz closure are not the ones people typically think about in this debate. Europe, Japan, South Korea, India, and China are the primary recipients of Persian Gulf oil. A long-term Hormuz closure would send oil prices to levels not seen in modern history -- some analysts suggest several hundred dollars per barrel in a prolonged scenario -- triggering recessions, supply chain collapses, and humanitarian crises across multiple continents simultaneously.
The numbers here are not ambiguous. U.S. production: 13.6 million barrels per day. Hormuz flow: 20 million barrels per day. U.S. net exportable surplus: roughly 2.8 million barrels per day.
The math ain't mathin'.
No combination of optimism, political will, or American exceptionalism closes that gap in any timeframe that matters during an active crisis.
Geopolitics is complicated. Energy arithmetic is not. Please stop spreading misinformation that leads people -- and policymakers -- to catastrophically underestimate what a Hormuz closure would actually mean for the global economy.
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