Reps. Ro Khanna and Brad Sherman, both California Democrats, are pushing to restrict U.S. oil exports, claiming that keeping more oil would help lower gas prices.
Critics say that the opposite is far more likely.
“If adopted, the political responses to the current high gas prices will make a bad situation worse,” Wayne Winegarden, a senior fellow at the Pacific Research Institute, told The Daily Wire. Restricting exports, he said, “creates a major long-term disincentive to expand oil production. And expanding oil supply is exactly what consumers need in light of the large supply shock that the Iran war has caused.”
Sherman recently introduced a bill to restrict American oil exports. If it passes, the legislation would restore an energy export ban that was eliminated under the Obama administration.
“This is a terrible idea that would rewind the clock on America’s energy success story,” Rep. August Pfluger (R-TX), one of Congress’s leading advocates for American energy independence, told The Daily Wire. “Since lifting Obama’s oil export ban, the United States became a net exporter of petroleum, strengthening our allies and creating thousands of jobs in places like the Permian Basin. Reimposing an export ban would hand leverage back to OPEC and Russia, hurt American producers, and weaken our energy security.”
Many U.S. refineries were built decades ago and are not designed to process the type of oil America now produces in massive quantities. The United States relied heavily on foreign imports, and American refineries were built to process the heavier crude oil coming from Venezuela, Mexico, and Canada. A technological breakthrough that combined fracking and horizontal drilling led to the shale boom of the late 2000s, flooding the market with lighter crude.
Refinery infrastructure did not evolve nearly as quickly as domestic production. About 70% of U.S. refineries are designed to process heavy crude oil. That mismatch between the type of oil America pumps and the type of oil it can refine is one of the primary reasons the United States both imports and exports oil.
“Although large quantities of crude oil are produced in the United States, it still imports crude oil to meet domestic refining needs,” writes the U.S. Energy Information Administration.
An export ban doesn’t correct that imbalance, experts say.
Dan Turner, founder and executive director of Power The Future, told The Daily Wire an export ban would “leave us sitting on all this oil with nothing to do with it.” Raw crude has limited value until it is refined into usable fuels like gasoline and diesel, and the United States lacks sufficient refining capacity to process the bulk of its oil.
Retrofitting refineries to process significantly more light crude would take years and cost billions.
But even if refineries were redesigned, the United States would still face another major obstacle.
A century-old law known as the Jones Act requires that cargo shipped between United States ports travel on American-built, American-owned, and American-crewed vessels. There are very few of them.
In 2024, there were only 92 Jones Act-compliant ships, creating a major bottleneck in domestic energy transport. Oftentimes, it is cheaper to import foreign oil than to move American oil from one U.S. port to another.
Keeping oil at home doesn’t mean it can get where it needs to go.
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