ราคาน้ำมันดิบยังคง "ต่ำ"ต่อไป

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"การเพิ่มขึ้นของการผลิต จาก 5.5 ล้านบาร์เรลของน้ำมันดิบต่อวันเมื่อ ห้าปีก่อน เป็น 9.2 ล้านบาร์เรลต่อวัน ณ วันนี้ เป็นเหตุผลหลักที่ทำให้ราคาน้ำมันดิบตกอย่างรวดเร็วในปีที่แล้ว"

นอกจากนี้ยังมีความพยายามที่จะยกเลิก "การห้ามส่งออก" ด้วย

Ban on oil exports should be lifted
By The Denver Post Editorial Board
POSTED:   04/12/2015 07:10:00 PM

Energy independence is one those slogans that politicians mouth without thinking, no doubt because it sounds so appealing. What could be better than freeing the U.S. from dependence on unstable or predatory regimes with vast energy reserves?

There's one major flaw in the argument, though. While natural gas does indeed have a domestic market that is largely untethered to gas markets in, say, Europe or East Asia, the same is not true of oil. The world market for oil is highly intertwined, especially for refined products. U.S. consumers would suffer a price shock at the pump in the event of a major disruption in supplies almost anywhere — say, a major Middle East oil field falls prey to a terrorist attack — even if the U.S. produced enough for its own consumption.

And yet the U.S. continues to impose a ban on oil exports that was enacted in the 1970s in the wake of the Arab oil embargo. For years the ban was relatively harmless, but today it inhibits domestic production and should be lifted.

Soaring U.S. production — from 5.5 million barrels of crude per day five years ago to 9.2 million today — is one of the major reasons the world price of oil fell so dramatically last year. But U.S. producers could have an even larger impact on world supplies and thus prices if they could directly export oil rather having to refine it here first — particularly because many refineries were set up to handle heavier crude imported from abroad.

The Brookings Institution is one of several policy organizations to conclude the export ban is outdated. Charles Ebinger and Heather Greenley of Brookings summed up their findings last year. "The report's analysis shows categorically that the crude oil export ban does not, and for some time has not, advanced U.S. energy security," they wrote. "To the contrary, our analysis demonstrates that lifting the ban will increase U.S. oil production, diversify global supply, reduce U.S. gasoline prices and provide net benefits to the U.S. economy."

The president has the power to lift the ban on his own. Congress could do it, too. If they did, they'd be creating jobs and aiding consumers with a single stroke.
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