it does, but it’s the setting up of those different filtration methods that’s the issue

to quote NPR, who had a good piece on this recently with an engineering Professor in Texas:

(starting mid-paragraph at the relevant part)

[…] depending on what the composition of that crude oil is, what chemicals are there to start with, you’re going to use different types of refining processes to get those end products out. We’re set up to refine a particular type of crude oil that comes from places like western Canada and Venezuela and Mexico. But other refineries around the world are set up to process different types of oil. And so there are some constraints based on that.

Why can’t we just refine our own oil here?:

Well, some of it is historic, and some of it just has to do with infrastructure. So the history is that there was a lot of refinery construction, you know, here along the Gulf Coast in the 1970s and '80s in response to the oil price shocks that we experienced back then. And at the time, a lot of oil was coming out of Venezuela. So they were set up to process all that Venezuelan crude. And once that started to dry up back in the 1990s, they were able to replace that with this heavier crude from other places.

Now, there’s also an infrastructure problem. Let me give you a good example. Refineries in California generally are processing crude oil that comes from the Middle East and Asia. And you might ask why, you know, if we’re producing all this oil in the U.S. And the reason is that there’s just not enough pipeline capacity to move oil produced here in Texas over to California where it could be refined. And the same is true for a lot of places on the East Coast. There is a real lack of pipeline capacity to move oil around within the country.

Why not build more refineries?:

There’s a couple of reasons. One is that building refinery is a really expensive proposition. It’s, you know, many billions of dollars to do that. Even retrofitting an existing refinery to refine a different type of crude oil, you’re spending tens to hundreds of millions of dollars to do that. And the problem with having that type of capital expenditure of that amount is that if you’re a business, you’re only going to do that if you see a long-term demand for the products that are going to come out of your refinery. If we’re looking at a relatively short-term change in the demand for your product, you’re not going to go ahead and spend that money. You’re just going to try to weather it out. And so that’s the situation we’re in right now.

My point in my comment was that you can’t just look at the amount of oil you currently produce (or could produce if production is increased) and look at the amount of oil you need to fulfil domestic demand and say “well, if the first number is bigger than the second number, we’re alright.” You have to get the oil to the refineries that were previously processing Middle Eastern crude oil (AKA pipeline construction), and then retrofit those refineries to handle the specific kind of oil you’re pumping, both of which are expensive and take time. Or, you could build new refineries closer to the oil sources specifically for processing the oil you drill, but that would also be expensive and take time. And because of neoliberalism deciding that importing crude oil from the Middle East and processing it is cheaper (and thus better) than processing your own oil, plus the faulty assumption that your supply of oil from the MIddle East would never be disrupted, the US is still gonna get hit hard from the Hormuz closure, no matter what Trump says about how the US “doesn’t actually rely on Hormuz at all, it’s only our allies”. Either he doesn’t understand this and is being stupid (I can imagine White House staffers trying to explain it to him and he just gets bored and walks off to watch a video of strikes on Iran with Subway Surfers on the side), or he does secretly understand this and is bluffing.

A US that properly prepared for the Iran War would have seen the construction of more refineries able to handle US oil in the years before the planned date of the conflict such that they truly were more insulated from a Hormuz closure, as well as filling up the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. But the US, or at a minimum the Trump administration, seems to lack any kind of long term planning.

I think it’s actually the other way around: most refineries in the us are set up for heavy, sour oil, while the us extracts light, sweet oil. This also means that there’s zero incentive to build refineries that can process american oil since the oil companies make more money selling the light, sweet crude on the international market and buying the cheaper heavy and sour crude to process for domestic consumption