Oil producers want U.S. to restrict imports By Kevin Robinson-Avila / Albuquerque Journal Staff Writer

The full Albuquerque Journal article is here-> http://www.abqjournal.com/803674/oil-producers-want-u-s-to-restrict...

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — New Mexico and West Texas oil producers are gearing up for a national effort to draw all major U.S. oil basins into a grassroots movement to restrict crude imports from overseas.

Leaders of the Panhandle Import Reduction Initiative, which launched in April in the Permian Basin, are seeking public meetings and rallies in other oil-producing zones to convert what’s now a regional initiative into a national movement, said Daniel Fine, associate director of the New Mexico Center for Energy Policy, who is working with local producers.

Those efforts will kick off in September with a presentation at the fourth Southeastern New Mexico Energy Summit in Carlsbad. After that, initiative leaders expect to hold public meetings in other shale oil basins, including the Bakken in Montana and the Dakotas and the Eagle Ford in South Texas.

“We’ll take it to Carlsbad first, and then it goes national,” Fine said. “We want to organize public rallies with producers and field workers whose jobs are at stake. This is a grassroots effort in the basins where the oil bust has taken place.”

The initiative is a reaction to the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries’ aggressive oil-pumping policies since mid-2014, which have helped drive global oil prices to ten-year lows and thrust domestic U.S. production into crisis. Initiative leaders say those policies were a deliberate effort by the mid-Eastern members of OPEC, particularly Saudi Arabia, to drive U.S. producers out of business.

Banning crude imports from overseas would undercut OPEC’s ability to manipulate prices, they say, and allow U.S. producers to ramp up domestic production to supply the U.S. market.

Today, about 50 percent of domestic demand is supplied by imports from the Mid-East, and foreign control of the market is growing, Fine said. From January-June, imports jumped by 10.5 percent, while domestic output declined by more than 400,000 barrels a day.

“Why are we buying imports from the Mid-East when OPEC has launched an offensive to basically shut down our industry?” Fine said. “It’s the same oil we’re producing in our shale basins where we have great supplies to meet market need. We can be completely self-sufficient, so let’s cut off over-supply of cheap imported oil.”

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Protectionist import policies have never served a beneficial economic national purpose.  Those who promote import tariffs or exclusions disregard history which demonstrates that the response is for other countries to place tariffs or exclusions on the commodities/products that we export.

OPEC has not specially targeted U.S. production, that is a fallacy promoted by those with an agenda or a lack of knowledge regarding the global crude market.  First of all, OPEC as a cohesive cartel ceased to exist long ago.  The driving force is Saudi Arabia (ARAMCO) which acts in its own best interests, not those of other OPEC members. The Sauds have one over arcing motivation and that is to defend their market share - regardless of price.  That defense is not targeted at any one exporting county - it is instead a defense against any and all who would seek to grow their market share - Russia, Iran, etc. 

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