03/15/2026
America produces more oil than any country on earth.
And yet we still import oil.
Which sounds like the sort of thing you’d only believe if it were written on a government website.
But the explanation is a lovely example of how economic systems behave like evolution, not engineering.
For decades American refiners made a perfectly rational bet. Heavy crude from places like Venezuela, Mexico, and Canada was cheaper.
So they spent billions building extraordinarily complex refineries designed to process the nastiest, thickest oil on the planet.
Think of it as building a factory that turns mud into champagne.
Then something awkward happened.
American shale unlocked enormous quantities of light crude. Lovely, clean, high-quality oil. The petroleum equivalent of a perfectly ripe peach.
The trouble is, our refineries were designed to process stew, not peaches.
So the system does something that sounds insane but is economically sensible.
America exports a lot of its light crude.
America imports heavier crude.
And refineries blend them together to maximise yield.
It’s rather like owning a bakery that exports flour while importing bread dough.
Ridiculous if you think in terms of national pride, perfectly logical if you think in terms of industrial equipment.
The mistake is assuming that a national economy is designed like a machine.
It isn’t.
It’s more like a garden.
Things grow in strange places, adapt over time, and occasionally make decisions that look mad until you realise they are simply responding to incentives.
